C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (Four Volumes Set)

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C. S. LEWIS Life, Works, and Legacy

C. S. LEWIS Life, Works, and Legacy Volume 1: An Examined Life

Edited by Bruce L. Edwards

PRAEGER PERSPECTIVES

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data C.S. Lewis : life, works, and legacy / edited by Bruce L. Edwards. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–99116–4 (set : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99117–2 (v. 1 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99118–0 (v. 2 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99119–9 (v. 3 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99120–2 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963—Criticism and interpretation. I. Edwards, Bruce L. PR6023.E926Z597 2007 2006100486 823
.912–dc22 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. C 2007 by Bruce L. Edwards Copyright 

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006100486 ISBN-10: 0–275–99116–4 (set) ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99116–6 0–275–99117–2 (Vol. 1) 978–0–275–99117–3 0–275–99118–0 (Vol. 2) 978–0–275–99118–0 0–275–99119–9 (Vol. 3) 978–0–275–99119–7 0–275–99120–2 (Vol. 4) 978–0–275–99120–3 First published in 2007 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This work is dedicated to my son, Justin Robert Edwards. Justin’s passion for life and for the life to come, his creativity and excellence in music and movie-making, his faith and resilience in the face of this world’s challenges, all inspire and amaze me, and bless everyone who knows him.

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface 1 An Examined Life: Introducing C. S. Lewis Bruce L. Edwards

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2 C. S. Lewis’s Belfast Childhood Richard V. James

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3 Lewis’s Early Schooling: Trials and Tribulations Richard V. James

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4 Lewis and Military Service: War and Remembrance (1917–1918) Colin Duriez

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5 Lewis the Reluctant Convert: Surprised by Faith Perry C. Bramlett

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6 Lewis in Oxford: The Student Years (1917–1923) Will Vaus

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7 Lewis in Oxford: The Early Tutorial Years (1924–1939) Will Vaus

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8 Lewis in Oxford: The Later Tutorial Years (1939–1953) Will Vaus

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9 Lewis in Cambridge: The Professorial Years (1954–1963) Will Vaus

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10 C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield: Adversaries and Confidantes Jane Hipolito

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11 C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien: Friends and Mutual Mentors Scott Calhoun

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12 C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman: Severe Mercies, Late Romance Lyle W. Dorsett and Jake Hanson

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13 A Grief Observed: C. S. Lewis Meets the Great Iconoclast Alice H. Cook

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Index

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Acknowledgments

The genesis of this four-volume reference set is the kind invitation I received from Suzanne Staszak-Silva of Greenwood Publishing Group in late Spring, 2005, asking me to consider creating a reference work that would comprehensively deal with the life and work of C. S. Lewis. As it was the case that I was almost literally heading out the door to Tanzania on a Fulbright-Hays Grant, we did not get to consider the project in much detail until the end of the summer when, with the help of my literary agent, Matt Jacobson, we cheerfully exchanged ideas with Suzanne that have led to the expansive volumes you now hold in your hands. Suzanne and all the capable editors and reviewers at Greenwood have been terrific to work with, and I am once again grateful to Matt Jacobson of the Loyal Arts Literary Agency for his expertise and wise counsel. No project of this kind can, in fact, come to fruition without the help of many hands. I want to start with the contributors to this volume and the breadth and depth of C. S. Lewis scholarship they represent. Each of them, especially those contributing more than one essay, have cheerfully met my prescribed deadlines and offered both incisive and learned commentary on the topics for which they were chosen. I want to offer special thanks to busy and illustrious Lewisian colleagues and scholars, David Downing, Diana Glyer, David Bratman, Don King, Marvin Hinten, Lyle Dorsett, Colin Duriez, Victor Reppert, Devin Brown, Wayne Martindale, and Marjorie Lamp Mead, for making and taking the time to contribute their unique vantage points to this collection. Their knowledge of the Lewis canon continues to provide us with fresh insights into his legacy. The exciting thing about this particular collection, however, is not only the opportunity to recruit the already renowned

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scholars listed above, but also to attract new talent and younger scholars who bring their own generational insights into the issues and contexts many of us have been sifting for years. Walter Hooper has been unfailingly kind in his support of this project, helping me arrange access to some special collections at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Of course, Lewis scholars everywhere are in his debt for decades of indefatigable efforts to make the letters and papers of C. S. Lewis available to the public. Likewise, Christopher Mitchell, Director, and his staff, at the Marion C. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, continue to operate the most outstanding resource center on C. S. Lewis and the Inklings in North America. I treasure every moment I get to spend in the beautiful Wade Center’s hallowed library. Scott Calhoun, a longtime colleague and friend from Cedarville University, Ohio, answered my call for some late counsel on the disposition of the last several essays to be included for publication, and I will always be grateful for his graceful editorial touches. (The only thing missing in this collection is an essay that I am sure Scott wishes to compose on the influence of Lewis’s work on U2’s Bono. Maybe next time, Scott?) My colleagues at Bowling Green State University, especially my immediate supervisors, continue to be generous in support of my research and lecturing on C. S. Lewis. They have provided me with the writing time one needs to produce a set of volumes of this magnitude. Dr. William K. Balzer, Dean of Continuing and Extended Education and Associate Vice-President, along with Dr. Linda Dobb, Executive Vice-President, made possible a Spring 2006 trip to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England, and a presentation at the “C. S. Lewis, Renaissance Man” Conference at Cambridge University that significantly affected the scope and accuracy of this work. My own staff headed by Ms. Connie Molnar, Director of Distance Education at Bowling Green State University, has indirectly made possible the efforts herein reflected, since their diligence and professionalism allowed me the freedom at crucial moments during the project to travel for research or to siphon off time for its final editing. Finally, while we were completing the last stages of this volume, my wife Joan and I were trying to finish the building of a new home. As anyone who has ever tried such a foolish and audacious thing can testify, it can make for some tense (and intense) hours. Joan has been her usual patient, kind, and thoughtful self in shouldering the burden for all sorts of decisions and contingency planning for the house, liberating me to read, write, edit, and email incessantly. In the end, her contribution to this four-volume set is equal to any I can claim. These volumes are for the “Keeping Room” shelves, Sweetie. Enjoy them!

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Since I have never left them out of any book I have published, I will not become inconsistent or ungrateful now. My children, Matthew, Tracey, Mary, Casey, Justin, and Michael always inspire me to reach higher and perform at my best. Their love and encouragement make all the difference on those dark and stormy nights when you wonder whether even one more word will come forth. Each of them is an artist or creator in their own right, with plenty of books (and songs and movies) of their own on the horizon. Michael specifically enhances this text further by contributing one of the most significant essays in Volume 4; I should have turned him loose on more topics! My father, Bruce L. Edwards, Sr., has always been steadfast in his support and encouragement for my work, and I sincerely thank him for continuing to take such good care of all of us. As does God Himself.

Preface

Scholars and admirers alike have long sought a full-fledged, balanced biocritical treatment of the life and works of C. S. Lewis. They, rightly, seek a treatise that does justice to his remarkably successful, multiple careers as a Christian apologist, science fiction and fantasy writer, literary historian, poet, cultural critic, and historian of words. Such a book will be sympathetic without being sycophantic, incisive without being sensational, and comprehensive without being copious. It will illuminate his life and times, including his interesting friendships, his composing techniques, and, of course, his personal piety. Above all, it will also help explain his enormous impact on contemporary Christianity, particularly in America, and it will set in appropriate historical context the important contribution his scholarship makes to literary culture and social and ethical discourse in philosophy and theology. Until such a book arrives, if it ever does, this current four-volume set will represent the most lucid, most dispassionate, well-informed, up-to-date, and comprehensive treatment of Lewis’s life, times, and legacy to have so far been produced, exemplifying the highest standards of historical research and employing the most responsible tools of interpretation. It has been too typical of the variety of biographies now available on Lewis for their authors to range between two extremes: (1) works furtively focused on certain presumed negative personality traits and ambiguous relationships and incidents that obscure rather than illuminate Lewis’s faith and scholarship; or (2) works so enamored of Lewis that their work borders on or exceeds hagiography and offers page after page of redundant paraphrase of his putatively unique insights. The former, despite their protestations that they

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operate out of an objectivity missing in other treatments, or out of a respect and a healthy admiration for Lewis’s “literary accomplishments,” tend to be transparently premised on a rather tendentious amateur psychoanalysis and often programmatically dismiss Lewis’s readership in order to discredit his literary and theological judgments. The latter evince the effects of the worshipful homage, exhausting readers and convincing them that Lewis is readily reducible to a few doctrines, a few genres, and, perhaps, a few penchants. Even so, enough of Lewis’s enumerable strengths usually emerge even from these biographies to reward the Lewisian enthusiast or skeptical inquirer hungry for more informed assessment of his achievements, and his continuing impact. It is the case, nevertheless, that the underlying theme of recent works, and among them I include biographies written by Britain’s A. N. Wilson and Australia’s Michael White, have been to “rescue” Lewis from the assumed cult of his evangelical idolaters, particularly in America. It is these folks who, Wilson, for one, avers in his 1991 study of Lewis, desire to create a Lewis in their own image, one they can promote as a “virginal, Bible-toting, nonsmoking, lemonade-drinking champion for Christ.” But such a stance reflects a surprising naivet´e about Lewis’s American readership and barely disguises its contempt for the esteem accorded Lewis’s scholarship, fiction, and apologetics in many diverse circles. One aim of this present reference work is thus to correct such stereotypes of both Lewis and his readership. To accomplish this, and many more worthy goals, one must offer a thorough-going, well-researched, yet also theologically sensitive treatment of Lewis’s life and times that takes into consideration not only his tumultuous upbringing but also his mature development, his successes and failures, his blind spots and prescience, his trek into and impact on both “Jerusalem and Athens” (i.e., religion and philosophy), and, the essential perspective discerning readers need to understand the key people and relationships in his life. Consequently, assembled for this volume are contributions from the finest C. S. Lewis scholars from North America and Europe. Their essays, one and all, have been solicited to be expansive, comprehensive, informed, and selfcontained prose works that contextualize each respective topic historically and deliver expository clarity to its reader. As one considers the table of contents, he or she will realize that the essays fall into four volumes slated to emphasize four distinctive areas of Lewis’s life and work. Volume 1, C. S. Lewis: An Examined Life, is explicitly biographical in its orientation and scope. Lewis’s early life, collegiate days, military service, friendships, achievements, and ongoing impact are set in historical context, starting from his Belfast birth in 1898 to his auspicious death on November 22, 1963, the day U.S. President John Kennedy was assassinated. New

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essays illuminate his relationships with J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and his beloved wife, Joy Davidman Gresham. Volume 2, C. S. Lewis: Fantasist, Mythmaker, and Poet, focuses on Lewis’s imaginative writing, foregrounding his achievements in fiction and poetry as one dimension of his notoriety and popularity worldwide. The provenance of his works and their significance in his times and ours are explored and defined capably. Volume 3, C. S. Lewis: Apologist, Philosopher, and Theologian, draws attention to the celebrity Lewis received as a Christian thinker in his radio broadcasts and subsequent renown as a defender and translator of the Christian faith among skeptics and believers alike in postwar Britain and abroad. His well-known works such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and Letters to Malcolm are given close readings and careful explication. Finally, in Volume 4, C. S. Lewis: Scholar, Teacher, and Public Intellectual, Lewis’s lesser known vocations and publications are given careful consideration and examined for the models they may provide contemporary readers and academics for responsible scholarship. This set of essays helps assess Lewis’s ongoing legacy and offers an extensive annotated bibliography of secondary sources that can guide the apprentice scholar to worthy works that will further assist him or her in extending the insights this collection presents. Within each volume, essays fall into one of three distinct categories: (1) historical, fact-based treatment of eras, events, and personages in Lewis’s life; (2) expository and literary analysis of major Lewis works of imaginative literature, literary scholarship, and apologetics; (3) global essays that seek to introduce, elucidate, and unfold the connections between and among the genres, vocations, and respective receptions elicited by Lewis in his varied career. In my original invitation letter, each essayist was told to trust his or her instincts as a scholar, and thus to be empowered to write the essay from the unique vantage point they represent from inside their discipline. Generally speaking, each kind of essay was thus written to accomplish the following: r The historical essays begin with a well-documented overview of their topic, foreshad-

owing the era, events, personages, etc., then proceed to a chronological treatment of the particulars, interspersed with connections, informed interpretations, contextualizations that illuminate the specific era covered as well as illuminating their relationships to other historical circumstances, publications, etc. When readers finish the essay, they should have at hand all the essential facts, accurately and chronologically marshaled, with a confident sense of the significance of this period, era, or relationship for Lewis’s life and work. r Exposition and analysis essays focus on single works in the Lewis canon and offer the reader a comprehensive overview of the work, including coverage of its origins and place in Lewis’s life and times, its historical meaning and contemporary significance, its reception among readers, scholars, academics, critics, and a reflective judgment

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on its enduring influence or impact. The readers of these essays will come away with a profound grasp of the value and impact of the work in itself and the reputation it creates. In cases where there may exist a range of opinions about or competing interpretations of the meaning or value of a work, the essayist articulates the varying points of view, weighing their cogency, and offering the reader an informed perspective. r Global essays provide an introductory, broad contextual sweep of coverage over the main themes of an individual volume’s topic areas, one per volume, focusing on the four divisions enunciated for the project.

My general exhortation to all contributors was that they try as much as it is within their power to emulate C. S. Lewis in style and substance, practicing the kind of empathetic dialogue with the subject matter that is characteristic of his own prose and poetry—as he saw it: “Plenty of fact, reasoning as brief and clear as English sunshine . . .” No easy task! But I am pleased to say that each essay does its job well—and, in my view, Lewis would not be displeased. I want to make the distinction as clear as possible between the four volumes published here and the typical “companion to” or “encyclopedia of” approach found in other treatments of Lewis’s life and work. We have not created a set of “nominalist” texts that focus on so many particulars that the “whole” is lost in the “parts.” Ours is not a “flip-through” set of texts in which “key words” drive the construction of essays and the experience of the reader—but one that features holistic essays that engross and educate earnest readers seeking an inclusive view of the essay’s topic area. While we enforced some general consistency of length and depth of coverage, there is no “false objectivity” or uniformity of prose style to be imposed. No, by contrast, these essays are meant to have “personality,” and serve as “stand-alone” essays that reflect an invested, personal scholarship and whose learned opinion is based on deep acquaintance with their subject matter. As independent Lewis scholars, it is important that all were granted the freedom to interpret responsibly and offer informed judgments about value, effectiveness, and significance of components of his life, times, and works, and to follow the scholarly instincts and unique insights wherever they may have led. It may be that here and there two essays will cross boundaries, and offer a different point of view on a shared topic. This is to be expected, and is not to be discouraged. Where there are controversial topics in Lewis scholarship, the task at hand was to “referee” the debate, explain the options, and gently lead us to the conclusions, if any, that best fit the facts. The bibliography for each essay is intended to be as current as possible as we reached our publication deadline, and should reflect the span of scholarship that has emerged since Lewis’s death in 1963. But, there is a major and comprehensive bibliographic essay on Lewis scholarship included in Volume 4,

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and we direct the reader’s attention there. As in any reference set of this scope, there will be unavoidable overlap in coverage of events, people, theme, citation of works, etc., throughout the volumes, and I humbly submit this is one of its strengths. Our contributors were attracted to this project because they saw that it offered C. S. Lewis scholars an opportunity to disseminate their work to a broader, popular audience and, consequently, offered them the potential to shape the ongoing public understanding of C. S. Lewis for a population of readers around the world for many decades. Those readers brought to C. S. Lewis through the increased visibility and popularity of The Chronicles of Narnia, will be especially enthused and rewarded by their sojourn in these pages. Our common approach in writing and editing this set is “academic” in the sense that it relies on studies/research/corroborated knowledge and reflection on assigned topics, but it is also the case that we always kept our general audience in mind, avoiding as much as possible any insider jargon or technical language that tends to exclude general readers. (Of course, any well-founded disciplinary terms necessary to explain and/or exemplify the achievement of Lewis are introduced and explained in context.) In the end, I am proud to say that our desire to present accurate and interesting information, wearing our scholarship firmly but lightly enough to invite entrance into fascinating, timely, and relevant subject matter about Lewis has been met. These essays were designed to reach, engage, and even enthrall educated and interested readers anxious to find out more about C. S. Lewis, including those who yet may not have any formal training in literary criticism or theology or apologetics per se. Indeed, these have always been Lewis’s most appreciative and attentive readers, and we are most pleased to have joined him in welcoming you here. Bruce L. Edwards

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An Examined Life: Introducing C. S. Lewis Bruce L. Edwards

It makes sense for the reader new to the life and work of C. S. Lewis to consider an overview of the basic chronology and important events and publications in his life. But it is also salutary for the veteran reader of Lewis to review the remarkable circumstances that outline his career and provide the context for considering his achievements. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 29, 1898, Clive Staples (Jack) Lewis was reared in a peculiarly bookish home, one in which the reality he found on the pages of the books within his parents’ extensive library seemed as tangible and meaningful to him as anything that transpired outside their doors. As adolescents, Lewis and his older brother, Warren, were more at home in the world of ideas and myths of the past, than in the material, burgeoning technological world of the early twentieth century. When the tranquility and sanctity of the Lewis home was shattered beyond repair by the death of his mother when he was nine, Lewis sought refuge in composing stories and excelling in scholastics. With this profound loss, he soon thereafter became precociously oriented toward the metaphysical, and to ultimate questions. The rest of his saga and the particulars of his writing career might be seen as the melancholy search for the security he had took for granted during the

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peace and grace of his childhood. But, by Lewis’s testimony, this recovery quest was far from melancholy, and, while undertaken under dark skies at times, it was to be fulfilled only in the “joy” he discovered in an adult conversion to Christianity. Post-conversion, Lewis became a prolific and influential writer to a diverse set of audiences he could never have anticipated as he prepared himself for the lifelong profession of literary scholarship at Oxford University. Long-time Lewis friend and former literary executor of the Lewis estate before his death, Owen Barfield has suggested that there were, in fact, three “C. S. Lewises.”1 That is to say, during his lifetime Lewis fulfilled three very different vocations—and fulfilled them successfully. There was, first, Lewis, the distinguished Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar and critic; second, Lewis, the highly acclaimed author of science fiction, myth, and children’s fantasy literature; and third, Lewis, the popular writer and broadcaster of Christian apologetics. The amazing thing, Barfield noted, is that those who may have known of Lewis in any single role may not have known that he performed in the other two. In a varied and comprehensive writing career, Lewis carved out a sterling reputation as a scholar, a novelist, and a theologian for three very different audiences. A brisk trek through the works that comprise his canon can be a strategic prelude to looking closer at the life and times of the person whose life this reference set is designed to illuminate. SURVEYING THE LEWIS CANON A brief summary will not do justice to the many and varied works Lewis produced in his productive adult years between 1919–1961, but it is a helpful beginning place for coming to grips with Lewis’s amazing popularity and continuing presence in the world of letters. A sampling of the range and depth of his achievements in criticism, fiction, and apologetics must begin with the first books Lewis published, two volumes of poetry: Spirits in Bondage, published in 1919 when Lewis was but twenty-four, and his long narrative poem, Dymer, published in 1926. Neither were critical or popular successes, convincing the traditionally trained Lewis that he would never become an accomplished poet given the rise of modernist poetic sensibilities such as those reflected in the work of T. S. Eliot. Subsequently, he gradually turned his vocational attention to literary history, specifically the field of medieval and renaissance literature, as his disciplinary focus. Along the way, however, Lewis had embraced Christianity, a fact that cannot be stressed too much in coming to understand his motivations and decisions thereafter. In 1933, Lewis published his first theological work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, not a parody but a respectful tribute to John Bunyan’s familiar The Pilgrim’s Progress, that

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details Lewis’s flight from skepticism to faith in a lively if sometimes obscure allegory. In 1936, Lewis had published the breakthrough work that earned him his reputation as a scholar, The Allegory of Love, a work of high-caliber, original scholarship that revolutionized contemporary literary understanding of the function of allegory in medieval literature, particularly Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Between 1939 and 1954, Lewis continued to publish well-received works of literary history and a few volumes of what we would now call “critical theory.” For instance, Lewis debated critic E. M. W. Tillyard on the functional objectivity of poetry and poesis in The Personal Heresy, published in 1939, and in that same year published a collection of essays under the title Rehabilitations—a work whose title thematically characterized much of Lewis’s work, as he often found himself attempting to bring the fading critical reputation of authors or genres he revered back into balanced perspective among the literati of his time. Indeed, his 1942 work, A Preface to Paradise Lost, attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of seventeenth century poet, John Milton; while in 1954, he offered a comprehensive overview of sixteenth century British poetry and narrative in his exhaustive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Lewis is best known, however, for his imaginative fiction and his Christian apologetics, two domains complementary to each other within his canon of works. In 1938, Lewis published the first book in a science fiction space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, that introduced his hero, Edwin Ransom, a philologist modeled roughly on Lewis’s friend, J. R. R. Tolkien. Perelandra, a retelling of the Garden of Eden story that results in a Paradise Not Lost scenario, set on Venus, followed in 1943. Finally, That Hideous Strength completed the trilogy in 1945, a novel Lewis billed as “a fairy tale for adults,” treating novelistically a host of the themes Lewis had developed in his critique of modern education in The Abolition of Man that had been published two years earlier. Lewis’s most notable critical and commercial success, however, is certainly his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, which he published in single volumes from 1950–1956. These popular children’s fantasies began with the 1950 volume, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a tale centered around Aslan the Lion, a Christ-figure who creates and rules the supernatural land of Narnia. Lewis’s own favorite fictional work, Till We Have Faces, his last imaginative work, published in 1956, is a retelling of the Cupid/Psyche myth, but has rarely achieved the critical recognition or popular readership he hoped it would. Lewis’s reputation as a winsome, articulate proponent of Christianity had begun with the publication of two important theological works: The Problem of Pain, a defense of pain—and the doctrine of hell—as evidence of an ordered and meaningful universe, published in 1940, and The Screwtape

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Letters, an “interception” of a senior devil’s correspondence with a junior devil fighting with “the Enemy,” Christ, over the soul of an unsuspecting believer, published in 1942. Lewis emerged improbably during the war years as a religious broadcaster who became famous as “apostle to the skeptics” in Britain and abroad, but especially in the United States. His wartime radio essays defending and explaining the Christian faith comforted the fearful and wounded, and were eventually collected and published in America as Mere Christianity in 1952. In the midst of this prolific output, Lewis took time to write his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, published in 1955. In the last decade before his death, Lewis published at least six more books that directly or indirectly served him in the task of apologetics and Christian exposition, among them The Four Loves, Reflections on the Psalms, A Grief Observed, and Letters to Malcolm. He is arguably the most important Christian writer of the twentieth century, certainly for North American readers, and now, well into the twenty-first century, it seems as if this description might continue to be applicable, as we witness Lewis’s readership expanding demographically and geographically. AN EXAMINED LIFE Against the odds, Lewis and his work increasingly find enthusiasts around the world who continue to celebrate his life and legacy, reading his works and viewing movies made from his stories earnestly and voraciously. Some 55 years after the first publication of his artful children’s fantasy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the casual reader may express amazement that C. S. Lewis’s book sales are still roaring along, but a more knowing student of his work might observe that “he is not a tame author.” With the worldwide release of the movie version of the first Narnian Chronicle having surpassed $750 million in revenue since 2005, we know his book sales have skyrocketed further.The Chronicles of Narnia not only stay in print, but so also do newly formatted and continually reconfigured compilations of his essays, poems, and unpublished short stories—even calendars of quotations. The sheer fact that an author who died almost a half century ago still enjoys having virtually every single thing he ever published (and some things he never intended to) still in print tells one a lot about his legacy and his impact. (It is hard to name another in his era or any other of whom this can be said.) Whether veteran Lewis reader or novice, it is useful for one to ask why Lewis continues to be so accessible, readable, popular; some further biographical inquiry, beyond Lewis’s bibliographical history, can help situate our perspective on the continuing-to-astound Lewis in the present climate. Fellow fantasist J. R. R. Tolkien, instrumental in Lewis’s conversion, once joked that his friend was the only man he knew who published more books

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after his death than when he was alive. (We can now say: Tolkien should talk.) That this C. S. Lewis—“Jack” to his friends and family—would come to be, forgive the pun, lionized first and foremost as a Christian apologist in a time of ostentatious skepticism toward revealed religion or the embrace of a softer New Age mysticism is one of literary—and Christian—history’s greatest ironies. A succinct recap of his journey to faith, central to understanding Lewis’s achievements and his appeal, is thus warranted. A bitter and confirmed atheist after his mother’s death when he was age nine, the young Lewis endured a series of misadventures in boarding schools that led his father to rescue him by placing him with a tutor who would help him shape his analytical skills for what would become an outstanding Oxford career in philosophy and literature. Before that could commence, Lewis would become a World War I veteran injured by friendly fire who, while in the trenches of France, jotted a poem denouncing the “ancient hope” of a “just God that cares for earthly pain” as merely a “dream.”2 Lewis was clearly one of the least likely converts among the literati of his time. But in his superb spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis detailed his road to conversion, which included books and providential friendships that led him out of unbelief to a principled agnosticism, and from there to a benign but fervent theism and, eventually, to Christianity. Books by George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, and friendships with Owen Barfield and J. R. R. Tolkien, were particularly important. Lewis met Barfield at Oxford in 1916 just prior to going off to war, and called him “the best of my unofficial teachers.” A keen dialectician himself, Barfield’s chief contribution to Lewis’s journey of faith was his demolishing of Lewis’s “chronological snobbery,” the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”3 Liberated from the notion that the past was invariably wrong and the present always the barometer of truth, Lewis was able to embrace the possibility that the ancient Christian narrative could have validity, even urgency, in the jaded twentieth century. The final blow against Lewis’s comfortable agnosticism came during his ardent companionship and intense conversations with J. R. R. Tolkien, for it was he who led Lewis to the conclusion that Christianity contains in the incarnation of Christ “the true myth, myth become fact” and the one story in which Lewis could put his full confidence. In Barfield and Chesterton, Lewis touched the power of reason. In MacDonald and Tolkien, Lewis experienced the power of the imagination. In Christ, Lewis believed he had embraced the Author of both. The post-conversion Lewis, circa 1931, began thus a dual career: on the one hand maintaining his scholarly poise and productivity, astonishing colleagues with both his erudition and his prolific publication rate; and, on the other

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hand, slowly and quietly building a reputation as a modern day Aquinas or Newman, a “translator” and “popularizer” of Christian doctrine for a skeptical and credulous age, as valuable outside the church as inside. Lewis’s aforementioned experimental allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, had given him further impetus to explore his faith in unusual genres, including science fiction—an unheard-of mode for an Oxford don to be indulging for personal readership, let alone as literary craft; his reading of David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus had convinced him that he could “smuggle in” a creative theology amidst an audience who would otherwise have their guard up. Lewis found himself teaching cardinal Christian doctrines by weaving them through the plots and conflicts, themes and characters of his three “interplanetary romances,” as he and Tolkien referred to them. It was his exposure to Lewis’s science fiction that led publisher Ashley Simpson to invite Lewis to contribute his first purely apologetical work in 1940, The Problem of Pain. This work— which exemplifies Lewis’s keen apprehension of audience needs, along with his power to create powerful metaphors and analogies, further demonstrated his formidable talent making difficult concepts understandable—a remarkable attempt to reconcile the concept of an all-powerful and good god with the presence of evil and suffering in the universe he created. This work, in turn, drew the attention of James Welch, head of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC, who would inadvertently launch Lewis on the road to becoming a religious celebrity. Welch was so impressed with Lewis’s compelling argumentation and fresh analogies in explaining the essentials of the Christian faith, he persuaded Lewis to commit to a series of radio broadcasts that would commence late in the summer of 1941. Lewis made his debut at 7:45 p.m., Wednesday, August 6, 1941. Later in the evening, air raid sirens would blare all over Britain, preparing citizens for what may be yet another bombing attack from Germany. That night a most unlikely new radio personality was to be born, speaking on the topic: “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” Lewis, with no particular experience in broadcasting nor in speaking to such a diverse, indiscriminate audience, was called upon to rally a fearful nation beset by war to courage and to hope. Lewis was such an immediate sensation—hundreds of letters, pro and con, pouring in from all quarters of the United Kingdom—the BBC invited Lewis to extend his original commitment first to eight, then to twelve, and, finally, to twenty-six broadcasts over two years. These talks became the foundation for the book eventually published as Mere Christianity (1952), the most widely read (and purchased) work of Christian apologetics of the last 60 years. It is a volume that continues to be credited for countless conversions and “reconversions” by the likes of such disparate people as former “Nixon hatchet

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man,” implicated in the Watergate scandal—Charles Colson, contemporary poet Kathleen Norris, and retired Domino Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan. Lewis’s reputation as a witty, articulate proponent of Christianity continued with The Screwtape Letters, the satirical depiction of Hell’s bureaucracy and the efficiencies it needed to achieve to destroy a soul before the Enemy could save it from the underworld. And, of course, The Chronicles of Narnia have now become hands down the works with which Lewis is most identified. The land of Narnia is his unique Neverland, populated by talking beasts and featuring the improbable adventures of four undaunted, intrepid British schoolchildren who stumble into Narnia through a wardrobe. And this literary wardrobe in turn opens up the rest of the Lewis canon to those who might otherwise have bypassed it. In canvassing his successful public career as a writer, it behooves one to ask: how can we explain this phenomenon? In my view, the answer is that Lewis lived “the examined life,” the life worth living, the life we all long to live, the life Socrates enjoined upon his ancient Athenian audience when he scolded them for living obliviously. It is the examined life that is worth living, the life lived with adroit self-analysis and vigorous, expansive curiosity about its meaning, its purpose, and one’s own destiny. Lewis lived such a life, chronicled it in his works, and made attractive once again the pursuit of the “road not taken,” in this case, the road of Christianity. Lewis possessed a vivid self-awareness of the shifting fortunes of humankind on a very precariously perched planet, parlaying his appreciation for world culture with his thirst for turning distinctive kaleidoscopic vantage points into tools and tactics that would assist him in making sense of a mad rush of languages, ideologies, historical events, and local customs. Lewis’s self-examination led him into an adventurous sojourn vocationally, which in turn provided him with opportunities to express to a wide variety of audiences, ages, and aptitudes his convictions about the modern world, its deficits, its blind spots, and its possibilities. He indeed, seemingly overnight, became that rara avis, a public intellectual who could speak with equal aplomb to the day laborer, the soldier, the artist, the shopkeeper, the scholar, or the bureaucrat. What is more, he could speak not only as the credentialed research scholar he was, but also as an articulate, winsome, robust, former atheist, now committed Christian: an even “rarer” avis. EMERGING FROM THE SHADOWLANDS Ironically, the continuing media image of Lewis is less “muscular,” that is, Lewis has been often portrayed in the shy persona of a vaguely misogynistic fellow, whose eventual marriage to an American woman, Joy Davidman

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Gresham, brings him out of his shell, adds sparkle and color to his life, and then breaks him in two when she succumbs to terminal cancer. This faulty image is borne aloft in large measure by the 1993 Hollywood docudrama, Shadowlands, derived from a BBC teleplay and several stage plays employing versions of William Nicholson’s original treatment, as well as Brian Sibley’s original biographical work, C. S. Lewis through the Shadowlands (1999), which focused on the unusual courtship of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham, late in their lives. More than a few Lewis admirers found that the Lewis whom Shadowlands director Sir Richard Attenborough created was an unrecognizable distortion, and thus regarded the depiction of Lewis’s relationship with Joy Gresham overly compressed and inexplicably absent of the spiritual fervor that brought them together. The dour, retiring Lewis depicted in Shadowlands, inexperienced with women and children, perpetually solemn and given to excessive brooding about suffering and God’s penchant for using pain to “rouse a deaf world” to action, could never have attracted the following the real Lewis has, let alone the attention of as vivacious and intellectually potent a woman as Joy Davidman Gresham. According to the Attenborough script, Lewis met Joy—and finally his life blossomed. Embracing her exuberance and American brusquery, Lewis comes out of his shell, suppresses his doubts, inherits a family, and enters into an idyllic though short-lived marriage stopped cold by Joy’s bout with and eventual death from bone cancer. At the end of Shadowlands, Lewis is seen skulking about, grasping for straws of faith, questioning the existence of heaven, and rebuking those who remind him of his former Christian confidence. True to life? One can say, unequivocally, the Lewis of Shadowlands—even conceding generous poetic license—never existed. The “historical” C. S. Lewis known to friends, students, colleagues, publishers, and correspondents—and as revealed in his own works—was a gregarious, ebullient, even impish sort of fellow who loved talk, conversation, “performing”; he was, in his day, the most popular lecturer in Oxford, one whose presentations were always standing room only. Jack loved to meet with friends Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield—a group labeled quaintly “the Inklings”—at a favorite local pub, the Eagle and Child, still operating in Oxford today, to read aloud from their works in progress, downing a Guinness or two or more along the way and entertaining anyone who strayed in their path. Far from being an austere or humorless fundamentalist, Lewis practiced and affirmed a dynamic, cheerful, and decidedly intellectual brand of Christianity informed by his own encyclopedic reading of time and culture and filtered through his Irish literary upbringing.

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The Lewis who eventually does meet Joy Davidman Gresham in 1952 has behind him two years of intimate correspondence with her, the knowledge that she has great familiarity with his own story and theology, and a profound respect for her own creativity and scholarly prowess. While there is no question that Joy’s sudden presence in his life in some sense “revives” Jack’s literary career, the personal transformation he experiences is much more subtle than that Shadowlands depicts. Jack’s life with Joy is more accurately seen as one of quiet renewal than as a radical shift in temperament; by all accounts, some of them begrudging, the couple made a formidable duo, soul mates at last together, united by faith, hope, and love. The movie does well cover the cruelty of their relationship’s brevity: Joy is diagnosed with cancer, rallies, and then succumbs. Jack takes Joy’s death hard—as would any husband. He wrestles openly with God— admirably and candidly told in his own memoir, A Grief Observed—explores his loss, but then returns, chastened yet emboldened, to his faith. The running theme of Shadowlands is that Joy is somehow able to disarm Lewis and call forth from him some depth of feeling and emotion that previously was suppressed or absent; the audience is led to believe that somehow Lewis lacked authentic experience in the world at large—either by isolation from it as an academician, or in retreat from it because of his mother’s untimely death. It is true, of course, that Lewis was not a particularly emotional or sentimental person, certainly not in the manner of the modern “sensitive” male hyped by Hollywood myth. He was, in fact, a quite private man, as evinced in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, which contains, by modern standards, very little gossip, very little preoccupation with personal detail, and little else that does not contribute directly to the story of his conversion. However, there is simply no evidence that Joy is responsible for a “new, improved” Lewis “able to show his feelings” for the first time in his life; Lewis was no stoic, philosophically or otherwise. No man with Lewis’s sensibilities could have failed to be moved by Joy’s determined faith and courage in the face of terminal illness and the movie does a credible job of depicting his genuine compassion toward her struggle. Most regrettable, nevertheless, is the movie’s climactic scene that depicts a broken, even hopeless Lewis inconsolable and bereft of any nurture comfort from his Christian faith, weeping uncontrollably with Joy’s young, “orphaned” son. That such a scene once happened, there is no doubt; that it was the final statement about Lewis’s life with Joy and faith in God is sheer nonsense. The real Lewis emerged from the shadowlands of grief and despair to a restored and invigorated faith that energized his last authored and perhaps most reassuring volume, Letters to Malcolm.

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THE REAL C. S. LEWIS So who is the real C. S. Lewis, and what is his appeal—beyond the very human, however compelling fictional character offered up in Shadowlands? Owen Barfield’s description is apt here: “Somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”4 Lewis’s life was, in other words, thoroughly integrated; a man whose presuppositions about life, faith, and reality, his reason and imagination, were all surrendered to God, and this spiritual integration manifested itself in all that he wrote or said—in every act of charity and every step of faith. Lewis had become a man who lived his life as if he were before Pontius Pilate. To wit, he carried out his daily tasks as teacher, writer, citizen, and believer as one who knew he was always before a skeptical inquisitor, one who too often hides from the truth and masks his fear of knowing the truth behind studied indifference and the pretense of being on the “search.” By any means necessary, Lewis endeavored to reach such persons, whether by keen argumentation or compelling narrative, arresting metaphors or appealing characterization; souls were at stake; ideas had consequences. He could not keep silent. But there is perhaps more to it than even this. As a witness to the remorselessly sectarian violence of his native Belfast, Lewis came to care most about what he called “mere Christianity,” that is, the essentials of the faith, that which has been the center of the creeds of the church since the apostles announced it. It was the good news freed of denominational idiosyncrasies, the debris of history, and focused on the essential truth of the identity and mission of Jesus of Nazareth. This “mere Christianity” focused not on what divides but on what unites Christians. It is this principled ecumenical Lewis that millions of Christians—and non-Christians alike—celebrate as his career flourishes. By all accounts, Lewis was a generous, self-effacing person who gave tirelessly of his time and money to the needy and an indefatigable correspondent to the spiritually curious or wayward; he was also a man devoted to a fault to his students and friends. Whatever else Lewis was, he was a man of faith willing to pay the price for his public defense of Christianity; deplored by colleagues jealous of his scholarly prowess, shamed by his open association with “popular literature,” and embarrassed by his public defense of Christianity, Lewis was denied a professorship at Oxford at the peak of his literary scholarship. As Christopher Derrick, a former pupil and longtime friend of Lewis, has judiciously observed, Lewis was a man willing to “challenge the entrenched priesthood of the intelligentsia.” In short, one finds in Lewis an uncommonly sober and articulate skeptic of the modern era, one forthrightly opposed to

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the “chronological snobbery” of our times that assumes truth is a function of the calendar and that the latest word must be the truest one. Such a writer will seem most original and most courageous in a time of cavalier relativism. While Lewis caricatured himself as a dinosaur, the “last of the Old Western Men,” many celebrating his heritage in the present would see him instead as a forerunner of what may still be the ascension of principled men and women of faith in an age that derides the pursuit of truth and mocks the desire to see virtue honored. Nevertheless, there remain skeptics. Lewis’s polymathic, eclectic, inimitably prolific multidimensional vocations as scholar, teacher, critic, novelist, fantasist, essayist, poet, broadcaster, memoirist, and correspondent do not necessarily mean that all share an enthusiasm for advancing or recognizing his legacy that endures and expands beyond any reasonable expectation. Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image Journal, decries in a provocative editorial entitled “Why the Inklings Aren’t Enough,” the “unbalanced diet” that, he says, Lewis and Tolkien unwittingly encourage at the expense of a healthier literary “realism”: “Many of these authors turned to the idyllic mode—in fantasy, allegory, and science fiction—to provide oases of meaning in a time of fragmentation. The Inklings championed ‘mythopoeic’ literature, the crafting of alternate worlds where symbols and stories could heal the wounds of modern, alienated man.”5 Lewis and other Inklings are too good, Wolfe alleges, at what they do, effectively erasing the modern novel as a genre for their readership. Wolfe calls this malady, “Inklingism,” and worries over “the fact that for many believers today, the Inklings seem to provide the sole literary diet. As we near the half-century mark since their deaths, this clinging to Lewis and Tolkien seems less a matter of homage and more an act of quiet desperation.”6 The truth is, Lewis has become less the “specimen” he predicted he would become, and more a stalwart stumbling block to some Christian intellectuals, and not a few literary critics, who find the perseverance of Lewis’s works somehow an indictment and a threat to their postmodern projects. Such “cultured despisers” of Lewis, some of whom attacked the Narnian movies as “empireenvy,” mere nostalgia for a return to days of colonialism, urge us to move on.7 Can we not see Lewis’s palpable anachronism, chauvinism, essentialism? Do we not notice his embarrassing rationalism and foundationalist penchant for natural law? His out of step and, forgive the pun, maudlin romanticism? Even worse, his ignorance of and inutility amidst all things Gallic: Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard? Over the last several years, Lewis has been accused of being too much a “modernist” to help streetwise postmoderns cope with the Enlightenment’s fall from grace, tied as he is to the Great Knock’s fierce dialectic and relentless interrogation. But wait, at the same time, he is also too much a “Romantic”

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to escape the self-absorption and introspection that postmodernism also manages to correct by corrupting any claims of objective value and rejecting the pretensions of any culture’s “grand narratives” to universality. These are the points at tension in Lewis’s little known but profound short essay, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” wherein he shows us the consequences of looking mono-optically, that is, “at” or “along,” any idea, experience, or worldview. On the one hand, we have one vestige of Western thinking still exalting the Enlightenment view that all kinds of knowledge are inevitably going to be accessible—and thus able to be catalogued incrementally and eventually exhaustively—to the glory of the human race. Through the disciplined use of human rationality and scientific induction and refined technology, we may formally name and harness the universe; a posture, I aver, that is exemplified in every version of the theory, I should say, “mythology,” of macroevolution. It exalts the single observer as the arbiter of truth while simultaneously undermining his or her qualifications for making such judgments. On the other hand is brand-name social constructionism that posits all reality is necessarily (and/or paradoxically, also, voluntarily) a product of human consciousness, a “willed world.” I can found a private worldview everyday, unbound by physics or physicality; gender being one of the more malleable categories in our age. Humankind thus must be resigned to continually creating but never understanding its own stories, and must obligingly despair of finding that one or the other might turn out to be true. These predicaments, which Lewis did, indeed, anticipate—and lament— deny individuals, clans, and whole civilizations any compass with which to navigate the world at large; naked consensus, enforced by power, greed, or sheer cleverness, can alone organize and perpetuate society under such conditions. “Under such conditions,” a person such as Lewis might indeed continue to be an able-bodied and able-minded companion to have along the journey. The uneasy alliance that some may have brooked with last year’s model of relativism is likely to be based on the very same unsavory alternatives that Lewis unearthed and helped to refute, or, at least, defuse 60 years ago in some of his most eloquent works. What we may call “hyperrealism,” Lewis called “scientism” or identified as a breed of “naturalism,” and is his target in The Abolition of Man, That Hideous Strength, and Miracles; all three of these works prophesy the demise of the Enlightenment and its subsequent dissolution into various relativisms and constructionisms that cheat humanity out of its humanness—that is, the image of God. Lewis also documented—and dealt with—proto-postmodernist beliefs in works such as An Experiment in Criticism, where he called it “egoistic castlebuilding,” and in A Preface to Paradise Lost, where he termed it “incessant

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autobiography.” And most profoundly, in his last fictional work, Till We Have Faces, Lewis offered us the story of a female protagonist who must surrender her “self ” in order to become whole—a story renouncing Romanticism even while examining critically its trappings. It is not, as it turns out, Lewis who is an anachronism; but scientism and postmodernism themselves, and their residual affectations. Even at the moment some of us seized the microphone to pledge our allegiance to the new order, busily recalibrating our theological and critical vocabularies for proper alignment with our more secular academic colleagues and publishing comrades, the sweep of rhetorical history had already passed us all by. But Lewis’s strategy was always to be “in, but not of ” the period in which he lived, tethering himself as a willing Odysseus to a perspective outside that world—that is, via divine revelation, to enable his participation in the voyage, all the while maintaining an equilibrium amid the endless undulations of time and culture: hence his maxim climaxing The Four Loves: “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”8 There are themes at work in Lewis, as well as a basic humility in his learnedness and collegiality in style and audience awareness, that resonate with readers over the world, but particularly in America. Though Lewis never traveled to America (unlike Chesterton, one his major influences as an apologist), there is a sense in which his many American fans and correspondents did bring him ashore into the American psyche and certainly into our hearts and minds. And, without doubt, Joy Davidman Gresham, did her part in acclimating Jack, albeit later in life, to our idiosyncrasies and preoccupations. In Lewis, many thus have found, even 45 years since his passing, a voice of reason, compassion, faith, and courage that gives us a place to stand in the maelstrom of life. Americans are not, as some European pundits are fond of proclaiming, “anti-intellectual,” but simply prefer their public-square spokesmen to be fair-minded and self-effacing. We don’t care to be lectured from atop high horses, but prefer a colleague who will saddle up next to us and talk to us on common ground. As I explain the phenomenon of Lewis’s continuing-to-grow audience to myself, I find that the most instructive essay of his is still “Learning in War Time,” a 1939 piece with a deceptively simple title that encompasses all of his winsomeness, based upon his transchronological insights, and overflowing with his cogent understanding of the implications of truly believing in something. It is here that Lewis’s Christian egalitarianism is most prominent, as this brief excerpt exemplifies: “All our merely natural activities will be accepted if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. . . . The work of a Beethoven and the work of a charwoman become spiritual on precisely the

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same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly ‘as to the Lord.’ ”9 As a student and traveler to all centuries but a permanent resident of none, he knew that Westerners once had but now lacked a vantage point outside of themselves, a perspective neither ahistorical nor antihistorical, but suprahistorical, unvested with our own petty ambitions and unreflective fallen preferences, that could light their paths. He believed that could only come from one source, from Heaven itself. Lewis lived the examined life, and he exhorted all who also sought it to look, not to him, but to the One who surprised him with joy, providing him a place to stand in this world so that he would secure a much better place in the one to come. NOTES 1. Owen Barfield, Preface, in The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer, ed. Bruce L. Edwards (Bowling Green, KY: Popular Press, 1988), 1. 2. C. S. Lewis, “XII: De Profundis,” in Spirits in Bondage (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1994), 20. 3. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 205. 4. Barfield, Taste of the Pineapple, 2. 5. Gregory Wolfe, “Why the Inklings Aren’t Enough,” Image Journal 48: Winter, 2005, http://www.imagejournal.org/back/048/editorial.asp (accessed August 14, 2006). 6. Ibid. 7. Consider these ill-tempered op-ed essays from near and far that accompanied the debut of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie: Adam Gopnik, “C. S. Lewis: Prisoner of Narnia,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2005, http://www.newyorker. com/critics/atlarge/articles/051121crat atlarge (Last accessed August 26, 2006); Charles McGrath, “The Narnia Skirmishes,” The New York Times, November 13, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/movies/13narnia.html?ex= 1156996800&en=ce321391153d8017&ei=5070 (Last accessed August 26, 2006); Polly Toynbee, “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion,” The Guardian, December 5, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/ 0,2763,1657759,00.html (Last accessed August 26, 2006); Alison Lurie, “The Passion of C. S. Lewis,” New York Review of Books, 53(2), February 9, 2006, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18672 (Last accessed August 26, 2006). 8. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, 1957), 137. 9. C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 55.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barfield, Owen. Preface. In The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. Edited by Bruce L. Edwards. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1988, 1–2. Edwards, Bruce L., ed. The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1988. Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, 1955. ———. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, 1957. ———. Spirits in Bondage. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1994. ———. “Learning in War-Time.” In The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001, 47–63. Wolfe, Gregory. “Why the Inklings Aren’t Enough.” Image Journal 48: Winter, 2005. http://www.imagejournal.org/back/048/editorial.asp (accessed August 14, 2006).

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C. S. Lewis’s Belfast Childhood Richard V. James

Since Chad Walsh’s book on the life and work of C. S. Lewis first appeared in the late 1940s,1 thousands of articles and hundreds of books have followed, each in its own way seeking to discover or explain the keys to understanding his life and his great literary, imaginative, apologetic, and epistolary works. Lewis himself suggests to us that his childhood, unlike his boyhood, is in unity with his adult life.2 Therefore, a review of his childhood and its setting should help the reader have a better understanding of Lewis’s formative years and what role they may have had in his adult contributions both to literature and to the spreading of his faith. In this appraisal of Lewis’s childhood, we will consider first what the former Bishop of Coventry and Lewis’s Chaplain at Magdalene College, Simon Barrington-Ward, describes as “the bowl he was baked in,”3 noting three significant and still available symbols of his childhood in Northern Ireland. Then, stepping back in time to the turn of the century, we will cast as wide a net as possible by first taking into account both the European political climate and the ever-present and complex “Irish Question” that always overshadows any discussion of “anyone and anything” Irish. Then, within this political and historical context, we will turn next to a discussion of Lewis’s family and its heritage and the key events of his early life up to his mother’s untimely death in August 1908.

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VISITING “LITTLE LEA,” ST. MARK’S, AND THE ULSTER COUNTRYSIDE Up through the late 1990s, few Lewis-related tours to the United Kingdom ever mentioned visiting Belfast. Most of these, after an arrival in London, took you to Oxford and Cambridge and maybe to some of the surrounding literary or historical areas. Now, three central landmarks, acting as signposts to Lewis’s early life, are included on most tours: St. Mark’s Dundela Church, Lewis’s second family home—“Little Lea,” and, most importantly, the physical landscape of Belfast and its surrounding environs. Both Clive Staples Lewis and his older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis, were born in Lewis’s first family home in the eastern suburbs of Belfast, in a district called Strandtown, more specifically in one of a pair of semi-detached houses named Dundela Villas on Dundela Avenue. His parents, Albert and Flora Lewis, had rented the home at the time of their marriage in 1894 from a Belfast banker, Thomas Keown, who was also Albert’s brother-in-law. The home was torn down in 1952 and the area is now part of a housing development called Dundela Flats.4 As Albert Lewis’s economic position improved, and as he also desired to improve his family’s social position, he chose to purchase land and build a much larger home nearer the open countryside. Lewis himself writes of this second family home, called Little Lea, as being “a major character” in who he became.5 Its location overlooked the Holywood Hills and Belfast Lough and was known as a place where the up-and-coming “new rich” and the “seriously rich” built their homes to which they then came away at night from their Belfast factories, shipyards, businesses, and official responsibilities. The Lewis family moved into Little Lea in April 1905, and it served as their family home until Albert died in August 1929. Little Lea, still a private home today, is almost exactly as Lewis and his many biographers have described it, except it is no longer surrounded by open country. From those small third-floor windows in the “Little End Room” at the top of the house, you can actually see out over the hills and down into Belfast Lough on one side, and, from the same floor windows, the steeple of St. Mark’s Church in Dundela on the other side. It was in this huge, red brick home, with its many rooms with their little nooks and crannies, its often Catholic servants and Presbyterian governesses, its many books and mostly Unionist visitors, its garden and the surrounding neighbors and countryside, with its extraordinary views and its proximity to the other “Big Houses” of Strandtown—it was here where Lewis spent much of his early years. Lewis could see St. Mark’s very well from his third-floor window at Little Lea. Distance-wise it is about halfway between the two Lewis homes of Dundela Villas and Little Lea. St. Mark’s is a unique collage of late nineteenth-

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century Victorian and Unionist Belfast—a microcosm of much of the Ulster heritage from which many consider that Lewis never left. For in this magnificent church, designed by William Butterfield and built in 1878, then expanded in 1891, Lewis had family and religious connections through his brother, his parents, his mother’s parents and his father’s siblings, and to additional social and Ulster political connections. This Church of Ireland house of worship is not only the font where Clive and his brother were baptized, but is also where many other symbols of Ulster religion, family life, social class, and politics intersect one another within the very fiber and atmosphere of the church itself. When entering the church from the right front of the building, the first religious symbol seen is the baptismal font. The silver vessels used on the communion table were given to the church by Lewis’s father, Albert, and his brothers and sisters in 1908. At the right front of the chancel and opposite to the pulpit is a lectern with an open Bible. This lectern was presented to the church by the cousins of Lewis as a memorial to Martha Gee Lewis, Lewis’s grandmother, in 1903. Halfway down the main aisle around a right turn and on the right wall, there is a set of beautiful stained glass windows given in 1932 to the church by Lewis and his brother, Warren, in memory of their mother and father. A little further down the aisle, on the same side of the building, is the Thomas Hamilton window, given in 1906 in memory of Lewis’s maternal grandfather.6 To discover the third symbol of Lewis’s early life—the sense of place that he found especially in the physical landscape in the north of Ireland—requires an imaginative visit into the countryside of County Down to the Holywood Hills, to the plains of Down and the Mourne Mountains. Then, travel along the coastline of County Antrim to explore Ballycastle, where his family visited, next going to the Giant’s Causeway and Dunluce Castle. After a journey up to County Derry to the seaside resort at Castlerock, take a final drive along either side of Belfast Lough, going north or south along the coast of the Irish Sea. Over and over again Lewis mentions his love of these special places in his letters to Arthur Greeves. So important was his love for County Down that while talking with fellow Ulster native David Bleakley about the definition of heaven, Lewis said, “My friend, you’re far too complicated; an honest Ulsterman should know better. Heaven is Oxford lifted and placed in the middle of the County Down.”7 FACING BACKWARD FROM 1898: EUROPEAN POLITICS AND “THE IRISH QUESTION” The three major physical landmarks of Lewis’s childhood are informative, but they rest in a much broader and even more complex setting. There is the broad spectrum of events in Western Europe near the turn of the century to

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consider as well, in addition to the history of the transformation of the prepartitioned Ireland into the late-Victorian Belfast that was a great industrial center at the end of the nineteenth century. In his monograph on the years from 1871 through 1900—that period close to the birth of Lewis—European historian Carlton Hayes asserts that this era, just after the Franco-Prussian War and just before World War I, had three undergirding issues. First and foremost was that in each of the nations of Europe there were the chief conditioning philosophies of Darwinism and industrial materialism, compelling national leaders to strive for material and military might.8 Secondly, the four decades of peace that were experienced between the six great European powers of Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Russia, Austria– Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire after 1871 were attributable less to a universal “will to peace” than to each of these nations being absorbed with the preparations for an eventual war.9 Finally, parallel to each European power’s individual emphasis on the growth of its own industrial and military might, this era also had what Hayes calls a “resurgence of national imperialism,”10 grounded first in a desire for national prestige and commercial expansion, but later simply rationalized into what poet Rudyard Kipling would write about in 1899 as the “White Man’s Burden.” By 1895, this “might makes right” philosophy, the “armed peace” and the “resurgence of national imperialism” had so influenced European diplomacy that two major alliances were created: the Dual Entente, made up of Russia and France and the Triple Alliance, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. While Great Britain’s intention was to remain isolated from either of these coalitions, by 1904 it was again working closely with France, and by 1907 it had also settled its differences with Russia. Thus, the Triple Entente now existed alongside the Triple Alliance, with both ready to react to each other if the need arose, but neither necessarily ready to go to war at that time. But that moment soon arrived as over the next several years quite a few colonial and nationalistic quarrels finally led to the assassination, in June 1914, of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by a Serb. One month later, war was declared by Austria on Serbia. Russia then mobilized its army on its German border with Germany then declaring war first on Russia and then on France, invading it via Belgium. This invasion of neutral Belgium subsequently brought in the British Empire that declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914. Even though British law would exempt the Irish from being drafted into this war, thousands of them, both Protestant and Catholic— including Lewis and his brother Warren, their family members, neighbors, friends, and school mates—would eventually find themselves voluntarily in harm’s way.

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Just as imperialism, nationalism, and an armed peace in Europe combined with mediocre, diplomacy eventually found the right combustible moment in the Balkans and imploded the whole of Europe into war in 1914; similar forces that led to eventual and continuous conflict were also at work between the peoples of Ireland and Great Britain and also among the Irish themselves. By the 1870s, this so-called Irish Question already had behind it some seven centuries of grievances, beginning with the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the late twelfth century by Henry II that established sections of Ireland as England’s first and longest held colony. Lewis’s grandmother, Mary Warren Hamilton, was descended from William of Warenne, a Norman knight who had fought in the first Norman invasion of England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings and was buried at Battle Abbey.11 According to George Sayer, members of this same Warren family were later sent from England to Ireland by Henry II.12 Then, almost four centuries later, in 1541, Henry VIII changed his official title from Lord of Ireland to King of Ireland, making him the first English ruler to claim the whole island for England. Subsequently, the native people of Ireland were to experience with England what W. B. Yeats described as the ringing of four historic and symbolic bells— “four deep and tragic notes in Irish history.”13 The first bell rang in 1607 with the “Flight of the Earls”—those Irish Catholic leaders who had earlier revolted, been defeated by Lord Mountjoy, and then left Ireland. Their estates, mostly in Ulster, were then settled by loyalist Protestants who were sent to Ireland by James I from England, Scotland, and Wales. According to part of the Lewis genealogy records published by Hooper, Flora Hamilton Lewis’s forefather, seven generations back, Sir James Hamilton of Finnart had a son Hugh Hamilton, who was one of those who came from Scotland in the reign of King James I, settling at Lisbane, in northeastern County Down.14 William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, 1690, symbolized the second of Yeats’s “Four Bells.” As a result of this interval of fighting, more than 10,000 Irish Catholic soldiers left Ireland and sailed for the continent—commonly called “the Flight of the Wild Geese.” The Protestant ascendancy now firmly established Ireland, with the ownership of land passing into their hands. Parliament also enacted a series of anti-Catholic statutes. Accordingly, the Catholic population was now both defeated in their revolt and detested by its victorious master, with what was felt on the one hand to be a righteous resentment, but which, on the other hand, was fully and immediately returned by the vanquished. Much of the present-day political antipathy in Ireland, between both extreme unionists and nationalists, has its roots in the memory of this outwardly “religious” conflict. Its annual celebration is still observed as a holiday in Northern Ireland by the Orange Order with parades and

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anti-Catholic tirades, even now over three centuries later, seeking to both intimidate their enemies and to memorialize William of Orange’s victory. Yeats’s third bell rang near the turn of the next century after the defeat of William Tone and those who rebelled with him in trying to establish a separate republic on French principles in 1798. The eventual result of this rebellion was the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. With its own Irish parliament now dissolved, this union provided for Irish seats in the British parliament at Westminster and several pro-Irish laws were enacted: in 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act; in 1868, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; and in 1870 and 1881, the Land Acts. This eventually led, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, to a joining of the nationalist members of parliament, led by Charles Parnell, with the British liberal members of parliament, led by Gladstone, enabling them together to almost pass the Irish Home Rule Bill through the Parliament twice, in 1886 and in 1893. For a number of years following the dissolution of the Irish parliament and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, home rule had been a somewhat vague federalist concept of self-government welcomed by both Catholics and Protestants, especially the middle and upper classes. But as both Parnell’s followers in Ireland and Gladstone’s Liberal Party in England began to give it more concrete definition in the Home Rule bills, a strong Conservative—Unionist opposition movement developed in the northern Ulster counties. Drawing upon anti-Catholic fears within Ulster, the phrase, “Home rule is Rome rule,” became one of the underlying messages of this resistance movement. The Lewis Papers, edited in the 1930s by Warren Lewis, portray the young Albert Lewis, Clive and Warren’s father-to-be, as an often sought-after Unionist speaker who frequently spoke against both Gladstone and home rule.15 It is ironic that what Gladstone had hoped would solve the entire Irish Question would eventually became the source of such strong Ulster resistance, with Ulster eventually being the only part of Ireland to have home rule as Gladstone had originally intended it be. According to Yeats, the fourth tragic bell rang after the political fall of Parnell, owing to his affair with the then married Katherine O’Shea and his connection with her eventual divorce in 1889. Both Gladstone and the Catholic Church refused to support his leadership. Having been one of Ireland’s most successful nationalist politicians, Parnell’s moral fall created a political vacuum for the Irish nationalists who had followed him and who had wanted to work for reform and home rule through constitutional means. Into this vacuum a disheartened and cynical Ireland considered turning away from peaceful to violent means to accomplish their goals. Ultimately, this lead to the formation of local militias for both the nationalist and the unionist cause.

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Yet paradoxically, according to Irish historians, Maire and Conor Cruise O’Brien, this period from around 1890 to 1910 outwardly seemed more like a political Indian Summer: “Protestant Ascendancy politics in the United Kingdom looked bright and even the time of troubles seemed to have ended with the Irish nationalists seeming harmless.”16 Moreover, conservatives, when they were back in power, were, for the most part, trying to kill home rule by kindness—offering concessions of economic and land reform. But, in reality, Unionists never really solved the Irish Question and the nationalist desire for the redistribution of political power. Historian Jeremy Smith writes of “a state of brooding resignation” with the nationalist movement’s enthusiasm temporarily “flowing into cultural spheres.”17 Thus, in 1893 the Gaelic League was founded with a Protestant, Douglas Hyde, as its first president. Its focus was on preserving the Irish language, encouraging the study and publication of Gaelic literature and cultivating a modern literature in Irish. Other contemporary Anglo-Irish authors such as William Butler Yeats, John Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory were also prominent in promoting this literary revival. They each “embraced cultural nationalism, condemning British rule as an obstacle to the appreciation of distinct, creative and significant native tradition.”18 Much good was done, and at first the league was nonpolitical, supported by both nationalists and unionists. But gradually it was taken over by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a revolutionary group that was prominent in the Easter uprising in Dublin in 1916. LATE VICTORIAN BELFAST In many ways the late-Victorian Belfast into which Lewis was born in 1898 had as many contradictions within it as did both the quiet but simmering armed peace of Europe and the outwardly calm but festering Irish Question. As the center of industrial revolution in Ireland, Belfast, under the Union, grew from a population of 25,000 in 1808 to nearly 350,000 at the turn of the twentieth century. Its name came from the Gaelic phrase, Beal Feirste, meaning “the mouth of the ford.” Although the current location was the site of a thirteenth-century castle, Belfast was not a place of much importance until the seventeenth century, when it was officially founded by Sir Arthur Chichester in 1603 as a place for English- and Scots-Protestant settlers. It was formally designated a city in 1888 by Queen Victoria. Due to the story of the ill-fated RMS Titanic, many are familiar with Belfast’s Harland and Wolff Shipbuilding Company. Formed in 1861, it was known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “shipyard of the world,” and was equipped to build the largest seagoing vessels of its

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time. But shipbuilding was not the only industry of consequence at the time of Lewis’s birth. For at this time, Belfast also had “the largest weaving factory, the largest shipping output, the largest tobacco factory, and the largest ropeworks in the world.”19 Sayer’s biography of Lewis includes several important points about Belfast. He states that its formation from deliberately planned colonies of Scottish and English Protestant settlers made Belfast an “entirely artificial city.” These settlers, he notes, also brought with them their strongly held religious beliefs and made Belfast into a “city of churches and churchgoers.” Sayer also concludes that the close ties with Britain made it into a loyalist city of “strongly held political views.” He mentions as well that shipbuilding and the manufacture of rope made the Belfast skyline into a “forest of cranes and gantries.”20 But all was not well. Sayer observes that Belfast at the end of the nineteenth century also was an “unhealthy city” due to overcrowding. It had an inadequate sewer system, there was a “shortage of good weather,” and there was an “alarmingly high infant mortality rate.”21 Moreover, Belfast was ripe for strife as the linen, shipbuilding, and rope making industries drew a strong working class Catholic minority from the south of Ireland to staff its mills and factories. These low-paid workers, then, tended to segregate themselves into residential enclaves, setting the stage for the future discord that would come between the Catholic nationalists and the Protestant unionists during most of the twentieth century. RESEARCH INTO LEWIS’S FAMILY HERITAGE Researching published primary or secondary sources on Lewis’s life before the writing of his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1954), reveals almost nothing about his family or his early childhood. In the 1944 sketch of his life in Current Biography, only one of the nine paragraphs mentioned his life up to that time, and only one sentence, mentions anything about him before he entered Malvern College in September 1913, just before his fifteenth birthday. We are told only that “Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, November 29, 1898, the son of A. J. Lewis (a solicitor of that city) and Flora Augusta (Hamilton) Lewis.”22 Even the September 8, 1947, six-page cover article on Lewis in Time has little to say about his family or early personal life—only mentioning that he “was born in Belfast, Ireland, where his grandfather, an itinerant Welsh boilermaker-turned-shipbuilder, had settled.”23 Walsh’s biography of Lewis was one chapter of ten pages, which he called a “bare bones biography,” where he began by noting that “to students of heredity, Lewis would be an intriguing research problem. His veins flow with a complex blend of aristocratic and peasant blood.” Walsh did write a couple of additional

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pages on Lewis’s grandparents and his early difficulties, also mentioning his older brother, Warren, but there was still very little information on those early days before Lewis was ten.24 Then in 1955, when Lewis published his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, a great deal more about his family and his childhood were revealed. Lewis wrote about his family heritage, his nurse, his brother, his early aesthetic experiences of “joy,” the homes in which he lived, his early home-schooling with his mother and a governess, the stories he wrote, the books he read, and, of course, the grief he felt upon the death of his mother. In 1966, Warren Lewis, in his introductory memoir to the first edition of Lewis’s letters, shared a few pages about their early life in Belfast—mentioning again their close friendship with one another, the effect of the wet climate on the development of their imagination and writing skills, the excitement of the long summer holidays at the seashore, how their father’s business obligations seemed more important to him than being with his wife or children, and the happiness the brothers experienced together at their new home, Little Lea. It was also in this memoir that the general public discovered what the child Lewis was called by his family and close friends—first Jacksie, then Jacks, and finally Jack. Not much more was published about his family and his early life until Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper published their 1974 biography of Lewis, Lewis: A Biography. In its prologue these authors explored more background about both his paternal and maternal grandparents, and of how Flora and Albert came to meet and court one another. But Green and Hooper’s most important disclosure, related to Lewis’s family and his childhood, was the existence of thousands of pages of family letters, records, diaries, and photographs that Lewis’s parents had stored at Little Lea, which had been inherited by the brothers after their father’s death in 1929. These family papers were then taken to Oxford, where it became Warren’s task to edit and type these papers. The result was an 11-volume family memoir, The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930, which Warren completed in 1935. When Warren’s editing and typing was finished, all of the original sources were destroyed. Within the scope of their own work, Green and Hooper acknowledged that they were not able to make full use of The Lewis Papers but hoped that later biographers would include more of it into their works.25 According to Hooper, there are only two places where The Lewis Papers can be read: at the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College near Chicago, Illinois, and at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in Oxford, England.26 Every major biography of Lewis since that time has made use of this immense source of information on Lewis’s family and his early life. While each offers some important insights in this area, it is this author’s opinion that George

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Sayer’s Jack: A Life of Lewis (1994) remains the definitive biographical guide to understanding both his ancestors and his childhood. Sayer brings both an appreciative and critical eye to the task, giving readers a more balanced and closer view of Lewis’s life. Since Sayer wrote and revised his original biography of Lewis, several additional resources, helpful for the study of the Lewis’s family and his early days, have been published. First, in 1996, Hooper published his Lewis: A Companion & Guide, in which he also included several excellent biographical sketches and short articles on places important to the study of Lewis and his family. Similar additional information is also found in Hooper’s biographical appendices in each of the volumes of Lewis’s collected letters. Also very helpful is Ruth Cording’s brief review of Lewis’s early life in her 2000 book, Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life, in which she publishes many of Flora’s letters to Albert while she and the children are away at their seaside summer vacations. THE FAMILIAL MATRIX OF THE PARADISE THAT WAS LOST Of the four of his grandparents who all lived in the Strandtown suburb of Belfast when Clive Staples Lewis was born, the least is known of his paternal grandmother, Martha Gee. In Surprised by Joy, she is never mentioned. Since she died in 1903, he may have had very little personal remembrance of her. Born in 1831 in Liverpool, she met her husband, Richard Lewis, while he was both a worker and student on Merseyside. They were married in 1853, and she shortly traveled with her husband to Cork, Ireland. There, over a period of 11 years, she had six children: Martha, Sarah Jane, Joseph, William, Richard, and Albert James. Sadly, her first child, Martha, born in 1854, died when she was only six. On the other hand, William, born in 1859, lived on to 1946. Shortly after the birth of Albert in 1863, she moved again with her husband, in 1864, to Dublin, only to move again 4 years later, for good, to Belfast. There for the next 39 years, she lived first in the Mount Pottinger area of Belfast, and then, from 1870 on, in the much nicer area of Lower Syndeham, in Strandtown, just east of Belfast proper. The Richard and Martha Lewis home, “Ty-Issa,” still stands on Parkgate Avenue, a few blocks down the street from the church they attended, St. Mark’s, Dundela—also the place where Lewis’s future maternal grandparents were raising their own children. An excellent individual picture of her is found in Hooper’s Through Joy and Beyond.27 She is also a part of a Lewis family portrait published in The Backward Glance: Lewis and Ireland by Ronald Bresland.28 Probably taken in either 1899 or near the beginning of 1900, this family photograph is described as the earliest known photograph of

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Lewis. Martha died four years later on January 19, 1903, almost two months after her grandson Jack’s fourth birthday. Albert’s father, Richard, born in 1832, is described by Lewis as a “self-made man” who was descended from a Welsh farming family. Looking back at the psychological makeup of his father’s family, Lewis attributed their somewhat unpredictable emotional nature to this Welsh heritage.29 Richard’s father, Joseph, in addition to being a farmer, was better known as a Methodist minister, having raised his family of eight children, with his wife, Jane Ellis, while living in northeastern Wales, first in Saltney and then in Sandycroft, Flintshire. In order for both to work on Merseyside and to further his education in ship’s engineering, Richard moved about 25 miles north to Liverpool. While there he met Martha Gee, and they were married in 1853. Then, along with two of his brothers, John and Joseph, Richard and Martha moved to Cork, on the southern coast of Ireland. There the three brothers began working for the Cork Steamship Company. Over the next 11 years, while Richard worked here as a master boilermaker, he and Martha had six children of which Albert was the baby of the family, being born in 1863. Also, during the time that he lived in Cork, Richard became very active in the writing of theological essays and reading them to his fellow workers in the company’s library and reading room. Several of these essays have been made a part of The Lewis Papers (Volume 1: 236–284) and can be read there. In the reverse of what his parents had done in changing their religious affiliation from the Church of England to Methodism, Richard and Martha chose to return to the Anglican Church.30 In July 1864, just a little less than a year after Albert was born, the family moved just under 200 miles to the northeast to Dublin. Here Richard took a management position, and before long he met John H. MacIlwaine with whom in 1868 he entered into a business partnership in Belfast. The business, known as “MacIlwaine and Lewis, Boiler Makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders,” was at first very successful and allowed the Lewises and their children to move up socially and, as was mentioned above, into a much nicer home. When both their relationship and their business turned sour, the business partnership broke up in 1887. After this date Richard worked for the Belfast Harbor Commission. Even after Martha’s death in 1903, Richard continued to live at Ty-Issa. But, in the spring of 1907, he moved into Little Lea with his son Albert and his family. During the Christmas holidays of that year, Lewis kept a diary that Warren copied into Volume 3 of The Lewis Papers. Among other things Lewis observed was that his grandfather Richard was generally nice, but also full of self-pity. It is here in the same diary entry that we discover

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it was to his grandfather, and the maid and cook, he revealed that in politics he was a “home ruler.”31 In Surprised by Joy C. S. Lewis remembered his grandfather Richard Lewis as always chanting the Psalms, being also both hard of hearing and sluggish in his movements and he was anxious about his health, often reminding them that the end of his life was near. Due to Flora Lewis’s illness, Richard Lewis had to leave Little Lea. Warren later discovered that his father, Albert, had written in his pocket diary the exact time of Richard’s death—1:00 p.m. on April 2, 1908. An individual photograph of Richard Lewis was published in Hooper’s Through Joy and Beyond.32 In the third sentence of Surprised by Joy Lewis announced that he and his brother Warren were the products of two “very different strains.” Sayer even made this phrase the title of his biography’s first chapter. What Lewis had been comparing on that first page was primarily family origins. Looking back as an adult, Lewis once told George Sayer that he was very grateful for being a descendent of a “practical Welsh farmer.” He felt that it gave him both the physical steadiness and vitality that helped keep him sane.33 Since his mother’s grandparents had been members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy for centuries, Lewis and his brother Warren, as children, had never had much appreciation for his father’s families of origin. His maternal grandparents’ ancestors had given birth to a continuous stream of clergy, lawyers, and other professions. But his paternal grandparents had always been, up until their father’s generation, members of the working class. This difference became more apparent as Lewis learned more details of his mother’s ancestry. Mary Warren Hamilton, his maternal grandmother, was born in 1826 in County Cork, Ireland. As was mentioned earlier, she and her father, Sir John Borlase Warren, Fourth Baronet, were members of a well-known Anglo-Norman family whose forebears had been sent to Ireland by King Henry II in the twelfth century to help establish English control over the Irish. Since that time they had been large landowners in southern Ireland. Additional information obtained on the Warren Family of County Cork show that both Sir John Borlase Warren, Fourth Baronet, and his wife and distant cousin, Mary Warren were descendents of Sir Robert Warren, first baronet (1723–1811) of County Cork who set up the baronet in 1784. Sir Robert was a descendent of another Robert Warren who had been an officer in Cromwell’s Army and who arrived in Ireland about 1649. Further still, through this same grandmother, Lewis’s lineage was also linked to a Norman knight, William of Warenne, who had fought in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings and had also married a daughter of William the Conqueror named Gundreda. It was his bones that were buried at Battle Abbey where the Normans had defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold. In fact, Green and

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Hooper wrote that this was the very “William of Warenne” that Kipling had mentioned in his poem “The Land.”34 In 1859, at the age of 33, Mary was married to the Reverend Thomas Robert Hamilton, a priest in the Church of Ireland who had been serving in the Royal Navy as a chaplain since 1854. Over the next 7 years she gave birth to four children: Lilian, born in 1860; Florence, also called Flora, born in 1862, who would be Lewis’s and Warren’s mother; Hugh, born in 1864; and Augustus, born in 1866. In 1870, after his naval service was complete, her husband was appointed to be Chaplain of Holy Trinity Church in Rome. She and the children lived there with him until 1874. After completing this ministry in Rome her husband was then appointed to be the rector at St. Mark’s Dundela Church in Belfast where the family moved and lived in what is now called the Old Rectory.35 Mary Warren was very unique for her time. Lewis noted that many considered her unconventional and full of unorthodox attitudes—a woman often seen as perceptive yet harsh and critical.36 Green and Hooper called her a “clever and aristocratic” woman. They quote an extensive and humorous paragraph from The Lewis Papers that describes her unusual lifestyle and the way she entertained and kept house in the Old Rectory. It was infested with cats and full of their odor, had a dirty drawing room with broken chairs and chipped serving dishes, but was also furnished with rare serving plates of china, silver, and glass.37 Mary Warren herself was a paradoxical member of the Protestant aristocracy whose primary interest was discussing politics— trying to convince others to support Irish nationalism through home rule. This was one of her favorite discussion topics with Albert Lewis long before he and Flora were married. In addition, her habit of hiring southern Irish house servants was frowned upon by many of her unionist Belfast neighbors.38 Lewis’s maternal grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Robert Hamilton, was born in 1826 and, as mentioned above, was the descendent of an aristocratic Scottish family sent to the Ulster region of Ireland in the early seventeenth century by King James I. Thomas attended Trinity College in Dublin and obtained a First in theology in 1848. In 1853, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland and then served as a chaplain in the Royal Navy from 1854 to 1870. Following a chaplaincy in Rome from 1870 to 1874 at Holy Trinity Church, he was assigned to be the rector of St. Mark’s, Dundela, in the Strandtown suburb of Belfast, serving there until his retirement in 1900. Thomas Hamilton died in 1905 at the age of seventy-nine. Having married Mary Warren in 1859 while serving in the naval chaplaincy, they became the parents of Lewis’s mother, Flora, her older sister, Lilian, and two younger brothers, Cecil and Augustus or “Gussie.” According to Sayer, Thomas and Mary were failures as parents—neither knowing how to make

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their children happy nor how to raise them without giving any of them preferential treatment. This they often did to Cecil and Lilian. Also, Gussie was so disliked by his father that he refused to help him pay for his education as he had helped the other children. And even though he eventually made good for himself, Gussie, in response, became completely self-centered and unkind to others, even to his mother and to his close friends.39 Hooper also notes that Cecil, after finishing his education and failing to obtain a commission in the Royal Army, emigrated to Australia—where he worked and served in their army, eventually dying in South Africa in 1900. Even Flora, with her great education at Queen’s University, Belfast, completed in 1886, as far as is known, failed to do anything with it—merely functioning as another servant for her mother. It would still be another eight years before she married Lewis’s father, Albert. Green and Hooper, among many other biographers, have noted how Thomas Hamilton misused Albert’s romantic interest in Flora for his own benefit, expecting Albert to travel with him or make preparations for him—serving his hoped-to-be future father-in-law much as Jacob served Laban for Rachel.40 The first two-thirds of Volume 1 of The Lewis Papers, over two hundred pages, is devoted almost entirely to the diaries and other writings of Thomas Hamilton—primarily his travels to Europe and India and his ministry in the navy during the Crimean War (1854–1856). From the vantage point of 1933, Warren Lewis introduced these writings of his maternal grandfather with a description of him that expressed a mixture of both pride and embarrassment. After taking one page to give a chronological list of Thomas Hamilton’s life and accomplishments, Warren then took almost two pages to elaborate primarily on his grandfather’s faults. With both himself and his brother newly returned to their faith in Christ, Warren was alarmed at his grandfather’s fervent religious prejudice against Catholics. He also described how, as rector, Thomas Hamilton had taken a “hands-off ” approach to his ministry at St. Mark’s, letting others more committed to the management and growth of the church take the lead in visiting the members or leading the programs of the church. While serving in the navy, he had led a very courageous and disciplined life, but to many he also came across as very arrogant and self-righteous. He spent most of his time, except for meals, in his study. In spite of this, instead of working on new messages for his people, Warren wrote that he tended to reuse his very emotional anti-Catholic messages that were written earlier in his ministry there.41 In Surprised by Joy, Lewis never directly mentioned his maternal grandfather except to speak of his aristocratic ancestry. Tony Wilson, in an appendix to Bleakley’s Lewis: At Home in Ireland, has noted: “The Lewis family sat

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in one of the front pews close to the pulpit, so the boy Jack would have been right under the eye of his grandfather, while he was preaching the sermon.”42 Yes, it is very probable that the rector’s daughter and her children sat up front in what might have been an ongoing tradition in the church. But it is highly unlikely that Lewis, being born in November 1898, would have ever remembered hearing his grandfather Hamilton’s messages, since he retired in 1900. Warren’s information about Thomas Hamilton’s highly emotional anti-Catholic sermons probably came from his parents or their siblings or others who had been active in the church while Thomas Hamilton had been their rector since Warren himself would have been at most four years old in 1900. Photographs of Thomas Hamilton by himself and with family group can be found in Through Joy and Beyond and The Backward Glance.43 In The Lewis Papers Warren spent five pages in Volume 2 recounting their father’s life and accomplishments up through 1901. As mentioned above, Albert was a native of Cork, in southern Ireland, but his eventual lifelong home was in Belfast. Educated first at a District Model National School, he then attended boarding school at Lurgan College in County Armagh from 1877 to 1879 where W. T. Kirkpatrick was the headmaster. Next, he was apprenticed to become a solicitor at a law firm in Dublin. He became certified as a solicitor in 1885, setting up his own practice in Belfast. Eventually, he became the prosecuting solicitor in the Belfast Police Courts. In 1885 he began courting his rector’s youngest daughter, Flora Hamilton, and first proposed to her in 1886. After a seven-year courtship, she hesitantly accepted his proposal and ring, and they were married in August 1894. Warren added to his account that his father was a strict churchman and was active in the leadership of St. Mark’s, Dundela, being their church warden several times as well as their longtime legal advisor. Albert’s hobbies included long solitary walks, eating, telling anecdotes, reading English literature and composing short stories and poems. In terms of temperament and character, Warren noted that their father gave his opinion on everything, was quite dramatic, had very high morals, and was kind to his servants and generous to the poor with both his money and services.44 Much more of this volume also encompasses his conservative unionist political speeches, his literary endeavors, and the courtship letters both Albert and Flora wrote to one another. Lewis later confirmed much of Warren’s account, but supplemented this portrayal by sharing that as a child he had observed that when his father became anxious that he would have a strong temper, speak without restraint, and treat others unfairly. This verbally abusive style of relating to his boys would hinder him in being the father they needed and tended to push them away from him when it happened.

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Wilson noted that Albert was a featured character in Surprised by Joy as a contradictory eccentric, but Wilson also felt that compared to an actual reading of Albert’s letters, poems, and other writings in The Lewis Papers, Lewis’s portrayal of his father’s reactions seemed over-exaggerated, giving the reader an unfair, almost comedic version of who he really was.45 Sayer also felt that Lewis overdid his criticism of his father, failing to note many of the positive things he did as well as the more obvious negative or eccentric things.46 Although Hooper notes that Albert and Flora Lewis’s marriage was an extremely happy one, Flora was not initially looking for Albert, or anyone, to be her husband. Having received her B.A. at Queen’s College in Belfast, she had a great aptitude for mathematics and loved to read novels. At first she wanted Albert only to be her friend and literary critic. She was not interested in a romantic relationship with him. It took him years of perseverance and persistence to get her finally to accept his proposal of marriage. Even then, her response seemed distant and unromantic. She wrote to him, on June 26, 1893, and told him that she liked him a lot and knew that she could not imagine loving anyone else. Yet, even though she was still not certain if she loved him, she was willing to marry him. Somehow that small step of commitment made a big difference, and their engagement led to their marriage on August 29, 1894. In her letters to Albert, Flora often expressed her self-doubts about her own ability to love him. At the same time, she wondered why anyone like Albert would ever love someone like her, especially when he came to know her better. Cording’s chapter on Flora provides an excellent overview of her life and accomplishments, imparting to her readers a unique empathy and connection with Flora that is often missed by the men who are Flora’s son’s biographers. Flora, even with her early faults, is shown by Cording to have matured emotionally—from a distant and undemonstrative young woman to a more mature and caring wife and mother.47 For example, some seven years into the relationship and just five months before her engagement she was still writing to Albert as “My dear Mr. Lewis” (January 27, 1893). This is to someone she had known and seen almost every Sunday at church since 1874. The greetings were “My dear Allie” on June 26, 1893. Later in the marriage she wrote greetings such as “My own dear Lal” or “My dearest old Bear,” and even later it became “My dear Love.”48 THE YEARS OF “HUMDRUM, PROSAIC HAPPINESS” BEGIN After their honeymoon in northern Wales, Albert and Flora began their married life back in Belfast, in Dundela Villas, not very far from either of

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their parents. Albert continued with his legal practice and police court work, and Flora, with her house servants, began working hard at setting up a home life for him. Warren, their first son, was born in their home on June 16, 1895. Clive Staples was born a little over three years later in this same home on November 29, 1898. Listed in the 1901 Belfast Census Return as having a family of six people—two parents, two boys, and two servants—this house had seven inhabited rooms with five front windows, including a stable, a coach house, and a harness room.49 Little has been published about those very early years at Dundela Villas for both boys. In his “Memoir,” Warren wrote of his vague recollection of his brother’s entry into the family. He remembered that his brother’s loud cries spoiled the peace and quiet in their home and he indicated that his baby brother was a competitor for his mother’s time.50 Sayer mentions that within a month after Clive’s birth, near Christmas of 1898, his mother had hired three more servants—a gardener, a governess, and a nursemaid. The governess, Annie Harper, was with them for the next 10 years, helping to educate and nurture them along with their mother. Examples of their home school grade cards for some of these years can be viewed at the Marion Wade Center. Lewis’s marks for both lessons and conduct were generally better than Warren’s. But both brothers had daily grades varying from average to very good. The nurse, Lizzie Endicott, was seen by Lewis as one who could do no wrong. Through this house servant both he and Warren made the important discovery that good character and social class were not necessarily interchangeable. She imparted to him a life-long memory of someone who was “simply good.”51 Both Lizzie and Annie were also part of some other very important activities during these childhood years. Due to the fear of having fevers such as typhoid during the warm summer months, many middle-class families took their young children to the seaside for up to 3 months each year. According to Warren, this was the most memorable part of their year.52 From June 1900 through September 1906, it was recorded in The Lewis Papers that they traveled each summer with their mother to such places in the north of Ireland as Ballycastle, Dunluce Castle, and Giants Causeway in County Antrim, Castlerock and Portrush in County Londonderry, and Ballyahinch and Killough in County Down. Then, in August 1907, mother and sons also took a holiday trip to London and the Normandy coast of France, returning back again through London to Belfast. These were all special times for the children with their mother. But these holidays also gave them a lifelong love both for riding the trains that took them to their destination and for the experience of the sea with its beaches and other nearby sights.53 In Surprised by Joy

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Lewis discounts the trip to London and France as memorable but also of little consequence in his life. And unlike Warren he never even mentions the seaside holidays. But through Warren’s and his mother’s letters, we learn several important facts about Lewis and his family. First, it was on one of these early holiday trips that Clive refused to be called by any other name than Jacksie, which was shortened to Jacks and then to Jack.54 He was either three or four years old when this name change occurred, as it was possibly in the summer of 1902 or 1903. In the letters published up until that date, in addition to Clive, he had been called by several different nicknames by his mother, among them— Baby, Babs, Babsie, and Babbins.55 In one of these same letters she told Albert that Lewis had called Warren “Warnie.” Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, claimed that the reason he called himself Jacksie was due to his fondness for a small dog named Jacksie that had been killed. Possibly Gresham received this information directly from his stepfather, for this detail is never mentioned by Warren or in any other major biography.56 Second, we learn in the very existence of these letters that Lewis’s and Warnie’s father was not with them for these extended holidays except on a few weekends when he felt that he could pull himself away from his work. How much this contributed to his sons’ difficulty in relating to him after their mother’s death no one knows. Third, when Lewis was describing his parents reading habits, he noted that neither of them had ever paid any attention to the “horns of elfland” as he had. Yet, Sayer remarked that it was probably these extended holidays at the seaside along the Antrim and Londonderry coastlines that had sown additional seeds for that romantic longing for “northernness” that was to be so dear to his heart.57 Finally, these early family letters from Flora to Albert depicted her concern for some of the climate and health issues related to her children. They confirmed Warnie’s assertions that they had to stay inside whenever it was wet, not only at home but on their vacations as well. To their benefit this always led them to make creative use of their time by drawing or painting and by reading or writing. This helped them develop and improve their “Animal-Land” and “India” stories that eventually become Boxen and laid the foundation for both ultimately becoming excellent writers. But Warnie was more than just a coauthor of Boxen with Lewis. Along with “good parents, good food, and a garden,” including a good nurse, Lewis saw Warnie as a close friend and colleague. Even though he was three years older than Lewis, they both related to each other on equal terms as they spent those many wet days inside working and playing together.58 At the time neither or them realized the important role they would each play in each others life later, but looking back through the eyes of faith, both realized that they were providential gifts to one another.

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THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE: DISCOVERING THE CENTRAL STORY OF HIS LIFE It was Warnie, while they were still living at Dundela Villas, who became the agent of Lewis’s first remembered awareness of Beauty and his recognition of his deep inner longing for Joy. Having found a biscuit tin lid, Warnie filled it with moss and then made it look like a toy-sized garden or forest by placing some twigs and flowers in the moss. When he brought that tin lid into the nursery that day, Lewis somehow sensed a sacramental connection between that toy floral arrangement and his later imagination of what Paradise would be like. Somehow those natural elements in the lid became transmitters of the numinous and connected with an inexplicable desire within him. This sense of desire that Lewis would later call Sehnsucht, a term he derived from his reading of German romantics, was a primary means by which God would draw him reluctantly, but steadily, to Him. In fact, we are told in Chapter 1 of Surprised by Joy that this longing for Joy was not only the principle theme of his spiritual autobiography, but was also the most important and essential theme of his life.59 All of Lewis’s published fiction, much of his poetry and most of his theological and devotional essays, are permeated with this important truth. In his preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress, he explained what he meant by this experience of intense longing that overshadowed both his childhood and adolescence. He also affirmed that if this “dialectic of desire” was followed to its end, it would in itself be a living ontological proof of God’s existence.60 In fact, philosopher Peter Kreeft went so far as to designate Lewis’s eventual “argument from desire” as the most poignant and philosophically successful argument for God’s existence than any other. He considered that after Anselm’s “ontological argument,” it was the one most interesting arguments in the history of human thought.61 A few years later, as Lewis stood outside on a summer day near a currant shrub, the memory of that first experience of sehnsucht came back to him. It only took a moment in time, but the memory of that first experience was so powerful and overwhelming that he could write in 1955 that it was “the most significant thing that had ever happened to him.”62 Another experience of sehnsucht came upon him as he was reading Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. As a child he enjoyed all of the Potter books. These stories with talking animals were great entertainment, but there was something in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin about the “Idea of Autumn” that brought the overwhelming feeling of intense longing upon him. Written in 1903, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin is the story of a naughty red squirrel who was “disrespectful,” “rude,” and “excessively impertinent” toward Old

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Mr. Brown, the owl. Eventually, he is caught by the owl and narrowly escapes death but ends up with a broken tail. But throughout the story as the other squirrels are gathering nuts there was in the illustrations that sense of Autumn as a season—its ripe nuts, its golden hazel leaves, the gathering of nuts for the winter months, and, as Derek Bingham suggests—“a glimpse of the impermanence of things.”63 A third early experience of sehnsucht occurred while Lewis was reading the following three lines from Longfellow’s translation of the Swedish poet Essias Tegner’s “Drapa”: I heard a voice, that cried, “Balder the Beautiful Is dead, is dead.”

According to Norse mythology, Hoeder (the god of darkness) had been tricked by Loki (the jealous god of fire) into killing his brother, Balder (the sun god), with a sharp spear made of mistletoe. Lewis wrote that at that time that he did not know anything about Balder. Yet, upon reading those first three lines, he was immediately drawn into an inexpressible mystical experience of northernness. Then, just like his other experiences of sehnsucht, the sensation of longing immediately left him.64 HIS NEW HOME, HIS READING, HIS WRITING, AND HIS GREAT LOSS On Good Friday, April 21, 1905, the Albert Lewis family slept in Little Lea for the first time. Not quite six and one-half years old, Lewis remembered this move from the “Old House” to the “New House” as the first major change in his life. The most significant thing he recalled about moving there was that the backdrop of his life was now larger than it had been at Dundela Villas. Much like Professor Kirk’s home in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis wrote that at Little Lea there were long hallways leading to bare sun-drenched rooms with upstairs attics to be explored at his leisure. Combined with the silence of those upstairs rooms, there were also the distant noises created by the water flowing through the cisterns and pipes and the wind blowing under the roofing tiles on the third floor. Moreover, everywhere there were books and books and books—all available for him to read.65 Warnie described the house as “a child’s delight,” full of tunnel-like crawl spaces with him and Lewis taking for their own a little end-room on the third-floor. There they could seclude themselves to do their drawing, reading, and writing, away from the maids and anyone else and look out the window to see the view over Belfast Lough to the Antrim Hills.

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Of the several other books that Lewis read in his childhood year were Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He enjoyed both for their information about the Arthurian legends. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift was also one of Lewis’s favorites, as were the Tenniel illustrations of dressed animals in Punch. He especially liked reading the fairytales of Edith Nesbit—Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet, and The Amulet. Scholars have noted the influence Nesbit must have had on the writing of Lewis’s own children’s fantasies, The Chronicles of Narnia.66 For example, in writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis likely subconsciously made use of Nesbit’s magic wardrobe idea from one of her stories, “The Aunt and Amabel,” that she published at the end of 1908.67 We also learn from The Lewis Papers that Lewis had left a note in his pocket diary stating that in that same year he had read Milton’s Paradise Lost.68 Even back at the Old House, the many wet days inside and the manual clumsiness of the Lewis brothers had given them the opportunity to express their own creative ideas through drawing and writing stories with each other. Warnie had been the leader in this enterprise, writing a story related to India. But soon Lewis began composing his own stories about Animal-Land with “dressed animals” who talked and “knights in armor.” During the seven months that Warnie was attending school in England each year, Lewis continued his writing in his upstairs hideaway. When Warnie would return on holidays, they both enjoyed updating and organizing their stories together. These adventures about “dressed animals” that talked actually turned out to be somewhat dull and very ordinary stories mostly about either adult themes such as politics or relationships transposed from Lewis’s family life. Warnie tells us that one probable reason for this is that “politics and money” were the main topics of conversation of those like-thinking unionists who visited regularly in his father’s home, to whom Warnie and Lewis were required to sit quietly and listen.69 Eventually Lewis’s Animal-Land and Warnie’s India were merged into Boxen, which was published 1985 with the subtitle The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis. The adult Lewis later stated that in writing Animal-Land he had been preparing himself to be not a poet but a novelist.70 Still focusing on Boxen, biographer Alan Jacobs applauded the young Lewis for his ability to blend together so many different types of characters and stories when he brought together the two worlds of Animal-Land and India into Boxen. To Jacobs, this demonstrated that even at a young age Lewis thought of “imaginary worlds as having permeable and negotiable contours and characters.” Would not this also be an author who might later be capable of putting “talking animals, fauns, witches, and Father Christmas in the same book, with Bacchus and Silenus in its sequel?”71

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On February 7, 1908, a dark cloud began to hang over the hearts of those who lived at Little Lea and, in some sense, it never went away. On this day two doctors came to visit with Flora. Four days later there was another doctor’s appointment. Then, on Saturday, February 15, three doctors and two nurses came to the house and operated for two hours on Flora to remove a cancerous growth. She soon recuperated and all seemed well. But then, the cancer and suffering returned and finally death came on August 23, 1908. It would be both a major loss and a great turning point in Lewis’s life. In Lewis’s opinion, since his father never completely dealt with his own grief, he later lost his relationship with his two sons. Lewis, nearly 10, was sent away from all that he knew and cherished at Little Lea to England with Warnie to attend Wynyard boarding school. Their family life would never again be the same. He and Warnie still had each other and would grow even closer to one another, but the sense of security and identification that his family, especially his mother, had given to him would never be again. CONCLUSION Lewis opened the first chapter of Surprised by Joy, “The First Years,” with an epigraph from Book IV of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which reads: “Happy, but for so happy ill secured.” In context, this quotation depicted Satan cynically sizing up the anticipated result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. To Satan, the bliss that they were enjoying was a great illusion that would soon be revealed to them and their Paradise would soon be lost. Such also was the armed peace and “outward calm” of both early twentieth century Europe and Ireland. War eventually came both on the continent and in Ireland, and neither was the same again. Similarly, the illusion for Lewis that a secure and loving home life, much like Eden, would continue was shattered in 1908 upon the death of Lewis’s mother. He would, of course, go on to enjoy many things in life: many books would be read and written, numerous honors achieved, faith and joy would be lost and found again, and deep friendships and love would come and then be taken away. But at this time in Lewis’s life, it certainly must have been felt that his paradise had been lost. NOTES 1. Chad Walsh, “Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics,” Atlantic Monthly 178 (September 1947), 115–119, and Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (New York: Macmillan, 1949). 2. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 71–72.

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3. Simon Barrington-Ward, letter quoted in David Bleakley, Lewis: At Home in Ireland (Bangor, NI: Strandtown Press, 1998), 46. 4. A memorial plaque marking Lewis’s birth site was erected at Dundela Flats in 1998. 5. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 10. 6. Ernest Hayes, ed., St. Mark’s Dundela, Diocese of Down: Its Annals and Archives (London: SPCK, 1932), 1–12. 7. Bleakley, Lewis: At Home, 53. 8. Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism: 1871–1900 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 5–6, 12. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Ibid., 216–241. 11. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 16. 12. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 27. 13. Maire O’Brien and Conor Cruse O’Brien, The Story of Ireland (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 61, 76, 89–90, 119. 14. Walter Hooper, Biographical Appendix, in C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1—Family Letters: 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 996. 15. W. H. Lewis, ed., The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930, Volume 2 (Leeborough Press, 1933), 119, 219–239, 243–247. 16. O’Brien and O’Brien, The Story of Ireland, 133. 17. Jeremy Smith, Britain and Ireland: From Home Rule to Independence (Essex, England: Pearson Education Unlimited, 2000), 4. 18. Lawrence McCaffrey, The Irish Question: Two Centuries of Conflict, 2nd ed. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 114. 19. Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis—A Study of Belfast Politics 1613-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1973), 107. 20. Sayer, Jack, 37–39. 21. Ibid., 39. 22. Anonymous, “Lewis,” Current Biography 1944, ed. Anna Rothe (New York: H.W. Wilson, Co., 1944), 411–412. 23. Anonymous, “Don vs. Devil,” Time 50 (September 8, 1947): 65–74. 24. Walsh, Atlantic Monthly, 115–119, and Apostle to the Skeptics, 1–10. 25. Green and Hooper, Lewis, 8–9. 26. Hooper, Introduction, in C. S. Lewis, Letters of Lewis, ed. with a memoir by W. H. Lewis, rev. and enlarged, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 10–11. 27. Walter Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 6.

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28. Ronald W. Bresland, The Backward Glance: Lewis and Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1999), 9. 29. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 3. 30. Hooper, Collected Letters, Vol. 1 Biographical Appendix, 1014–1015. 31. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, 89–92. 32. Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond. 33. Sayer, Jack, 21. 34. Green and Hooper, Lewis, 16. 35. Hooper, Lewis: A Companion and Guide (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 693. 36. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 42. 37. Green and Hooper, Lewis, 7. 38. Sayer, Jack, 28. 39. Ibid., 28–29. 40. Green and Hooper, Lewis, 17–18. 41. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers: Volume 1, 2–3. 42. Tony Wilson, “Lewis in St. Mark’s, Dundela,” in Bleakley, Lewis: At Home, 183. 43. Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond, 17; and Bresland, The Backward Glance, 5, 8. 44. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers: Volume 2, 61–66. 45. A. N. Wilson, Lewis: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 4. 46. Sayer, Jack, 45, 49, 74–75. 47. Ruth James Cording, Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2000), 32–41. 48. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers: Volume 2, 242, 248, 303–329, and The Lewis Papers: Volume 3, 18–24. 49. Bleakley, Lewis: At Home, 94. 50. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of Lewis,” in C. S. Lewis, Letters of Lewis, ed. with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. rev. and enlarged, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 21. 51. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 5. 52. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of Lewis,” 22. 53. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers: Volume 2, 306–310, 313–329, and The Lewis Papers: Volume 3, 1–5, 13–15, 18–24, 51, 71–75, 80–84. 54. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of Lewis,” 22. 55. Cording, Lewis, 52–59. 56. Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life: The Life Story of Lewis (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 2. 57. Sayer, Jack, 42. 58. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 5–6. 59. Ibid., 7, 17.

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60. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 7–10. 61. Peter J. Kreeft, “Lewis’s Argument from Desire” in G.K. Chesterton and Lewis: The Riddle of Joy, ed. Michael H. Macdonald and Andrew A. Tadie (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 249–272. 62. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 16. 63. Derick Bingham, Lewis: A Shiver of Wonder (Belfast: Ambassador International, 2004), 11. 64. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 17. 65. Ibid., 9–10. 66. Mervyn Nicholson, “Lewis and The Scholarship of Imagination in E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard,” Renascence 51(1) (Fall 1998): 41ff. 67. Kathryn Lindskoog, Preface to “The Aunt and Amabel,” in Kathryn Lindskoog, Journey into Narnia (Pasadena, CA: Hope Publishing House, 1998), 193–194. 68. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers: Volume 3, 102. 69. Ibid., “Memoir of Lewis,” 26–27. 70. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 15. 71. Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of Lewis (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2005), 13.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anonymous. “Lewis.” Current Biography 1944. Edited by Anna Rothe. New York: H.W. Wilson, Co., 1944. ———. “Don vs. Devil.” Time 50 (September 8, 1947): 65–74. Bingham, Derick. Lewis: A Shiver of Wonder. Belfast: Ambassador International, 2004. Bleakley, David. Lewis: At Home in Ireland. Bangor, NI: Strandtown Press, 1998. Bottigheimer, Karl S. Ireland and the Irish: A Short History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Bramlett, Perry C. and Ronald W. Higdon. Touring Lewis’ Ireland & England. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1998. Bresland, Ronald W. The Backward Glance: Lewis and Ireland. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1999. Budge, Ian and Cornelius O’Leary. Belfast: Approach to Crisis—A Study of Belfast Politics 1613–1970. London: Macmillan, 1973. Connolly, S. J., ed. The Oxford Companion to Irish History. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cording, Ruth James. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2000. Duriez, Colin. The Lewis Chronicles. New York: Blue Bridge Media, 2005. Green, Roger, Lancelyn, and Walter Hooper. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

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Gresham, Douglas. Jack’s Life: The Life Story of Lewis. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2005. Hayes, Carlton J. H. A Generation of Materialism: 1871–1900. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. Hayes, Ernest C. ed. St. Mark’s Dundela, Diocese of Down: Its Annals and Archives. London: SPCK, 1932. Hooper, Walter. Biographical Appendix. In C. S. Lewis. Collected Letters Volume 1— Family Letters: 1905–1931. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2000, 981–1024. ———. Introduction. In C. S. Lewis, Letters of Lewis. Edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. Revised and enlarged. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988, 10–11. ———. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of Lewis. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Jackson, Alvin. “Orange Order.” In The Oxford Companion to Irish History. Edited by S. J. Connolly. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 434–435. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of Lewis. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2005. Kreeft, Peter J. “Lewis’s Argument from Desire.” In G.K. Chesterton and Lewis: The Riddle of Joy. Edited by Michael H. Macdonald and Andrew A. Tadie. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989, 249–272. Lewis, C. S. Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young Lewis. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. ———. Collected Letters: Volume 1—Family Letters. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. Letters of Lewis. Edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. ———. Letters of Lewis. Edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. revised and enlarged. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955. Lewis, W. H. ed. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. ———. The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930, Volumes 1–3. London: Leeborough Press, 1933. ———. “Memoir of Lewis.” In C. S. Lewis, Letters of Lewis. Edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. Revised and enlarged. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988, 21–46. Lindskoog, Kathryn. Preface to “The Aunt and Amabel.” In Kathryn Lindskoog. Journey into Narnia. Pasadena, CA: Hope Publishing House, 1998, 193–194.

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Loughlin, James. “Home Rule.” In The Oxford Companion to Irish History. Edited by S. J. Connolly. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 257–258 McCaffrey, Lawrence. The Irish Question: Two Centuries of Conflict. 2nd ed. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Nicholson, Mervyn. “Lewis and the scholarship of imagination in E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard.” Renascence 51(1) (Fall 1998): 41ff. O’Brien, Maire and Conor Cruse O’Brien. The Story of Ireland. New York: Viking Press, 1972. St. Mark’s Dundela. http://dundela.down.anglican.org/frames.html (accessed August 10, 2006). Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994. Smith, Jeremy. Britain and Ireland: From Home Rule to Independence. Essex, England: Pearson Education Unlimited, 2000. Walsh, Chad. “Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics.” Atlantic Monthly 178 (September 1947), 115–119. ———. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics. New York: Macmillan, 1949. White, Michael. Lewis: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004. Wilson, A. N. Lewis: A Biography. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Wilson, Tony. “Lewis in St. Mark’s, Dundela.” In David Bleakley. Lewis: At Home in Ireland. Bangor, NI: Strandtown Press, 1998, 181–184. Woodward, R. Sommerville. A History of the Sillahertane Estate and House, Co. Kerry. Dublin: Eneclann Ltd., 2003.

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Lewis’s Early Schooling: Trials and Tribulations Richard V. James

INTRODUCTION In the late 1940s when Clive Staples Lewis began writing his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy,1 he chose to emphasize an area of his life that, as yet, none of his later biographers over the last 50 years has elected to highlight in the same way. For when the book was eventually published in 1955, he had devoted eleven of the fifteen chapters, over 175 pages, to the first 18 years of his life, with over 160 pages of those pages focused on his boyhood and adolescence, primarily covering the eight and one-half years from September 1908 through April 1917. This period in his life was devoted primarily to his pre-Oxford University education that had been provided by his father at four boarding schools and with one personal tutor: 1. Wynyard School in Watford (9/08–7/10) 2. Campbell College in Belfast (9/10–11/10) 3. Cherbourg School in Malvern (1/11–7/13) 4. Malvern College in Malvern (9/13–7/14) 5. W. T. Kirkpatrick in Great Bookham (9/14–4/17)

While quantity of pages written about a subject does not necessarily imply quality in terms of the importance of any specific period in a person’s life,

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it does communicate to the reader the significance that the author himself assigned to this phase of his life at the time that he wrote his book. In fact, Lewis himself explicitly tells his readers in the preface that these details about his early life would help them better understand what had made him who he was.2 According to C. S. Lewis he had lived an almost Edenic childhood on the eastern outskirts of Belfast until, in August 1908, just three months short of his tenth birthday, his mother, Flora, died of cancer. Looking back he realized, as he wrote about it some 40 year later, that this was the moment when the “ill secured”3 and seemingly “settled happiness” of his childhood ended4 and the “dark ages”5 of his boyhood began. This essay will cover those next years of transition, both of Lewis’s difficult boyhood and his distressing adolescence, until his arrival at University College at Oxford University in April 1917. First to be covered are the primary and secondary sources available for this essay, followed by a consideration of the context in which C. S. Lewis lived, taking account of the pre-war European political climate and the ever-present Irish Question. Then, an introduction follows of the British public school system and of the role that sea travel played in Lewis’s life. We will turn next to an appraisal of Lewis’s boyhood and adolescent years. Included will be an account of his relationship with his father and brother and a review of his boyhood and adolescent education. In addition there will be a consideration of his continued experience of joy from the study of Norse mythology, the music of Wagner, and the romances and fantasies of Malory, Morris, and MacDonald. Also, this essay incorporates an examination of his growing love for literature, especially the classics and nineteenth-century novelists as well as a brief glance at his growing passion for writing poetry. Finally, there is consideration of the double life that he began living at Cherbourg up through his time with Kirkpatrick (and even further until his conversion over a decade later) where his inner imaginative life was consumed primarily with joy and beauty and longing while the more outward rational life of the intellect was harsh, without meaning, and materialistic. RESEARCHING LEWIS’S PRE-OXFORD EDUCATION YEARS Before the writing of his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955) mentioned above, there are a few, but very short published primary and secondary sources available about his boyhood and adolescent years. One example of direct reference by Lewis to this period in his life is found in The Problem of Pain (1940) where he confesses that before he had come to Oxford that he had been “as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be.”6 A year later when Lewis wrote a brief introductory essay to The Faerie Queene in 1941, he began by stating that “Beyond all doubt it is best to have

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made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen.”7 That this is close to what actually happened to Lewis is confirmed in a series of letters that he sent to his father and Arthur Greeves from October 5, 1915, through March 7, 1916, when he was living with his tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick in Great Bookham, Surrey. In these letters he shares about his enjoyment of reading The Faerie Queene.8 Then, in the September 4, 1943, issue of Time and Tide, Lewis depicts what it was like to attend his first boarding school in Watford, Hertfordshire. This article was published during a very busy time of teaching and writing in Oxford, when he was also broadcasting on the BBC in London and traveling to speak at RAF bases all over England. Lewis reflects on both the mostly negative and few positive aspects of this early schooling, most of which eventually became part of Surprised by Joy.9 Finally, there is in his 1947 preface to his anthology of George MacDonald reference to that special day as a 17-year-old waiting for the train at Leatherhead Station in March 1916 when he first started reading Phantastes.10 By 1944, with the publishing of The Screwtape Letters (1942) and his BBC broadcasting, Lewis’s popularity with the public had grown such that some biographical data about him was now being shared with the general public. Everyone knew that he was a popular English don at Oxford, but little else was known about him—especially his pre-Oxford years. This is shown in the 1944 sketch of his life published in Current Biography. This article had only one sentence that mentioned his pre-Oxford education. We are told only that “[f]ollowing a year at Malvern College, he was privately educated by W. T. Kirkpatrick, the former Headmaster of Lurgan College.”11 A somewhat fuller treatment is found in the September 8, 1947, six-page cover article on Lewis in Time. Noting his boyhood and adolescent period that essay records that at twelve, “young Clive deserted the Church of Ireland for atheism.” The reporter follows this with several sentences about his reading of Phantastes.12 The first book-length study of Lewis’s life and works was published by Chad Walsh in 1949. Primarily concerned with his writings, the biographical context up to 1949 was covered in only the first chapter of ten pages. Here Walsh mentions that Lewis attended a “succession of boys’ schools, most of which he cordially detested,” and “after leaving Malvern College that he became a private pupil of an Ulsterman, W. T. Kirkpatrick.” Again, Lewis’s reading of Phantastes is discussed as are three reasons that “he tossed over the Anglican Church in which he had been reared.” Walsh lets his readers know that this chapter is merely “bare bones biography” and that Lewis himself is working on his memoirs, but does not know when they will be completed.13

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Those memoirs, first mentioned in March 1948 by Warren Lewis in his diaries as “J’s autobiography,”14 were eventually published in 1955 as Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Lewis himself chose to devote ten full chapters to his pre-Oxford educational experiences.15 With this abundance of primary information now public, little more new data on Lewis’s life was published until in 1966, when Warren published a 26-page introductory memoir to the first edition of C. S. Lewis’s letters. In addition to discussing their family heritage and their childhood in Belfast, the general public learns for the first time how the child, Clive Staples Lewis, came to be called by his family and close friends—first, Jacksie; then Jacks; and finally Jack. As regards Jack’s boyhood and adolescent years, Warren, aka Warnie, gives the real names of the schools Jack had called “Belsen,” “Chartres,” and “Wyvern” in Surprised by Joy. Here we also discover both Warnie’s agreement with Jack about the terrible conditions at Wynyard, and the major disagreement he had with Jack over criticisms of Malvern College. Moreover, Warnie adds some observations about Jack’s “happy days” with Kirkpatrick and the mutual enjoyment that his brother and Arthur Greeves had with one another. In addition, at the beginning of the letters’ section there are a handful of letters from this early period written by Jack to his father and Arthur from March 1915 to April 1917.16 Little more was published about his boyhood and adolescent years until in 1974 Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper published C.S. Lewis: A Biography. In the second half of their second chapter, “Early Days,” they spend about twenty-four pages exploring Lewis’s pre-Oxford education and give the reader even further details than what Lewis himself had shared in Surprised by Joy.17 But Green and Hooper’s most important disclosure that related to Jack Lewis’s boyhood and adolescence was the existence of thousands of pages of family letters, records, diaries, and photographs that Lewis’s parents had stored at Little Lea and was inherited by the brothers after their father’s death in 1929. These family papers were then taken to Oxford. It became Warren’s task, after his retirement from the army at the end of 1932, to edit and type these papers. The result was an 11-volume family memoir, The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850-1930, which Warren completed in 1935. When Warren’s editing and typing was finished, all of the original sources were destroyed. Lewis’s life from September 1908 to April 1917 is covered in the last portion of Volume 3, all of Volume 4, and the first portion of Volume 5—in all about 700 typed pages.18 Within the scope of their own work, Green and Hooper acknowledged that they were not able to make full use of The Lewis Papers but hoped that later biographers would include more of it into their works.19

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While The Lewis Papers still remain unpublished, it was in 1979 that another major treasury of primary sources on the teenage years of C. S. Lewis was made public. In this year almost three hundred of Lewis’s letters to his Belfast friend, Arthur Greeves, were published. Sixty-one of these pertained to Lewis’s adolescent years covering the last few months he was at Malvern College and all of the period that he was with Kirkpatrick. Somewhat controversial when they were published, the teenage Lewis’s personal life is placed into the public spotlight by the editor in some areas that Lewis had chosen back in the 1931 not to reveal to others. In addition, we learn more details about his relationship with his father, his reading and studies while with Kirkpatrick, his early poetic and prose compositions, and his preparation to attend Oxford.20 The book as a whole is the first candid and privileged peek at Lewis’s personal life dating from 1915 through 1963. Hooper also mentions in the introduction to these Lewis-Greeves’ letters, and later, in the revised edition of the Letters of Lewis (1988), that there are only two places where the unpublished Lewis Papers can be read: (1) at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College near Chicago, Illinois, where a bound copy is available for researchers, and (2) at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in Oxford, England, where there is a microfilm copy.21 Every major biography of Lewis since that time has made additional use of this immense source of information on Lewis’s boyhood and adolescent years.22 While each offers some important insights in this area, it is this author’s opinion that George Sayer’s Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (1994) remains the definitive biographical guide to understanding his pre-Oxford educational years, especially the Malvern College years since George Sayer himself was an English teacher there and was himself an unbeliever at this same period in his own life.23 In addition, Sayer contributes insights from his own personal relationship with Jack Lewis.24 No, it is not perfect, but he brings both an appreciative and critical eye to the task that gives the reader a more balanced and closer view of Lewis’s life than any of the other biographies written so far. It is somewhat paradoxical that even two of the most recent biographers of Lewis, Douglas Gresham and Alan Jacobs, have both been more positive than negative in their own estimate of Sayer’s book.25 Also worthy of note is the opinion, written by another of the recent Lewis biographers, John Bremer,26 of the “unsurpassed” authority that Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (1994) had. Bremer also writes that its “errors are few and minor” and “it reads well and presents an affectionate portrait without, however, omitting Lewis’s faults and vices.”27 Since Sayer wrote and revised his original biography of Lewis, several additional resources, helpful for the study of Lewis’s pre-Oxford education years,

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have been published. First, in 1996, when Hooper published his monumental C.S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide (currently re-titled as C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works), he also included several excellent biographical sketches and short articles on places important to the study of Lewis’s boyhood and adolescent period.28 Similar secondary information is also found in Hooper’s biographical appendix at the end of the first volume of Lewis’s collected letters.29 Another important resource guide is The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia (1998). Beginning with a 57-page biography by John Bremer and followed by contributions from over 40 authors to some 800 entries, a researcher will find there nearly fifty articles written on the places, themes, people, concepts, and published writings from this time period of Lewis’s life.30 Also, even though Ruth Cording’s book, C.S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life (2000) is primarily about his childhood, she publishes there several fragments of letters from Albert Lewis to Jack from November 29, 1908, through November 4, 1912.31 The adolescent Lewis loved to read poetry and also loved to write poetry; yet, until 1994 when Hooper added what he called “A Miscellany of Additional Poems” to the new edition of Lewis’s published poems, little was generally known of his early poetry. In this miscellany are ten poems dated from Easter 1915 through April 1917, including the now well-known “The Hills of Down.”32 These are all reprinted from The Lewis Papers. Then, in 1998, three more poems from this same period are published in Seven as part of an article by Don King.33 Four years later, in addition to his excellent analysis, King adds to the list of early poems that are now published from The Lewis Papers by reprinting several in an appendix in his book, C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse; by indexing there all of Lewis’s early poems chronologically and listing the published sources where all of them can be found; and by printing the contents of Lewis’s pre-Oxford and unpublished manuscript, The Metrical Meditations of a Cod. By comparing these last two lists, we discover that seventeen on this last list eventually found their way into his first book, Spirits in Bondage (1919). The appendix includes a reprint of “Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine,” an unfinished poem of 794 lines begun when he was attending Cherbourg School in Malvern in 1912. It was inspired by Wagner’s version of The Ring of the Nibelung. The fragments of another early Lewis poem, “Loki Bound,” are also reprinted in King’s appendix. In 1914, according to Warren Lewis, Jack had completed over thirty-two pages of this Greek tragedy that was based on Norse mythology. For some unknown reason only eighty-three lines were printed by Warren in The Lewis Papers.34 In his analysis King gives Lewis high marks for both of these early poems, considering that they were written by a 14- and 16-yearold.35

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In both Don King’s (1999) and David Downing’s (1998) articles on Lewis’s unpublished story fragment, “The Quest of Bleheris,” the public becomes more aware of one of the least known writings of Lewis’s pre-Oxford years.36 Written between May and October 1916, this 64-page prose romance entails a chivalric quest based on Norse mythology. Few Lewis biographers or analysts have even mentioned it. Jacobs, White, and Wilson do not refer to it. Green and Hooper are the first to mention it, but give it only one sentence. Sayer devotes only five paragraphs to it, and Walsh spends three pages on it. But King and Downing each take thirteen and eighteen pages on this one document, both summarizing and reviewing its importance for Lewis at this time in his life. In doing this they both see this story as an imaginative, but unfinished spiritual journey that possibly foreshadows Lewis’s later poetic prose quests like Pilgrim’s Regress or Perelandra or maybe even The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. All of these more recent primary and secondary sources have added much to the studying and researching of Lewis in this transitional stage of his life between the death of his mother and his attendance at Oxford University. But, next to the unpublished and difficult to access Lewis Papers themselves and Surprised by Joy, the most important primary resource now available that covers Lewis’s boyhood and adolescent period is the first volume of Lewis’s collected letters published in 2000. Unlike the two earlier editions of Letters of C.S. Lewis (1966 and 1988) that had just a few letters from this period, volume one of the collected letters published almost three hundred pages of Lewis’s letters, including all of the letters to Arthur Greeves, as well as those addressed to his father Albert and his brother Warnie.37 SETTING THE STAGE: EUROPE MOVES TOWARD WAR AND IRELAND TOWARD CIVIL WAR In the year 1908, Europe found itself almost at the close of what historian, Carlton J. H. Hayes, in 1941 called “a truce quite unprecedented in the annals of Europe!”38 For from 1871 to 1914 there were no wars among the great powers of Europe. Yet, this over four decades of outward peace had been bought with a great price that would eventually cause Europe to collapse upon itself. For these years without war were founded, according to Hayes, not so much upon a desire to work together for the good of all, as it was an attempt on the part of each of the great powers to absorb itself in preparation for any future war.39 This was done primarily by accumulating as much material and military power, colonial influence, and national prestige as it could, both individually and through alliances of convenience.40 In the meantime, the “sick man” of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, was trimmed of more

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than half of its European area and population, mostly by these other nations who outwardly were at peace with each other.41 Gradually, Europe’s “armed peace” between the Triple Entente (Russia, France, and England) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy), that had existed just after the turn of the century, eventually devolved into World War I. The immediate cause was due to a diplomacy crisis in the Balkans triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Subsequently, it was Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium that brought in the British Empire which then declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914.42 Both Hooper and Jacobs accurately describe the domino effect that was set into action when Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination of the Archduke.43 Warnie, Lewis’s older brother, was immediately called back to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst to complete his brief training as part of the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC). He was then deployed to LeHavre, France, that November. Jack himself would become an infantry officer three years later, arriving at the front on his nineteenth birthday, November 29, 1917. According to Sayer, Jack’s correspondence from Great Bookham reflects little familiarity with what was happening during World War I.44 Reminding the reader that to Lewis and to all British citizens it would have been called “The Great War,” Jacobs also assumes that Lewis would have “noted with interest the nearly complete absence of any reference to the war in his letters” as he read over them in the writing of Surprised by Joy.45 Wilson, in regards to the war, asserts that at Great Bookham, Jack was being “put into an idyllic position of isolation, far from Belfast and the Western Front.”46 But the real story is more complex. When war was declared in August 1914, Jack was only fifteen and would not be of military age until November 29, 1916. Yes, Great Bookham was far from the Western Front, but it is very close to London which was often bombed. Also, each time he traveled back and forth from Belfast to Great Bookham over the two and one-half years of his study with Kirkpatrick, he and his father had to take into consideration the danger of possible submarine attack in the Irish Sea. Moreover, of the 120 published letters written between September 21, 1914, and March 20, 1917, fully forty-four of these mention something in them related to the war. He makes reference to those who were injured, to refugees, to Warnie’s situation, to submarine attacks, to Zeppellin attacks nearby, Kitchener’s death, the ambulance corps, trench warfare, the great losses of the Ulster division, conscription, and much more.47 No, his letters may not show that he is following the war as a sports fan follows and knows the statistics on their favorite team. Nor are any of these letters completely about the war. Nor is the war a major topic in any

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of them. But neither do these more than one-third of his letters that have some connection with the war imply that Lewis is unfamiliar with what was happening. In the midst of the uncertainty of how long the war would continue, the soon-coming date of his military service availability, and, at the same time, his needing to make a decision about his future educational plans, his father tells Kirkpatrick in May 1916 that Jack had chosen to join the service and at the same time also go to Oxford.48 In December he registers and by April 30, 1917, two days after he has moved into his rooms at Oxford, he has become a member of the OTC. Reflecting back some 30 years after these events, Lewis remarks in Surprised by Joy that in order to both continue his studies and face the inevitability of serving in the war, he made “a treaty with reality.”49 This was a pact he made with himself that when the time came after November 29, 1916, he would be willing to serve his country and die in its wars. But, until that date came, his priority would be his studies with Kirkpatrick and his preparation for the entrance examinations into Oxford. The war, while important, would not be his main concern in life. Just as the armed peace, imperialism, and nationalism among the European powers combined with a diplomatic crisis in the Balkans to bring the whole of Europe into war in 1914, so, at this same period in Lewis’s homeland, the simmering “Irish Question” was again ready to boil over into conflict. Intermittently, over the last seven centuries, there had been conflict between England and Ireland—their first and longest held colony, and between the Irish themselves, those Gaelic, generally Roman Catholic natives, who had long-term birthright to the land long before the Normans first crossed the Irish Sea in the twelveth century and the Scotch and English Irish landlords who had been sent by their English rulers for economic and security reasons to colonize and subdue Ireland for the English crown over the last several centuries. In the context of this essay the last major Irish uprising against England had been at the end of the eighteenth century and had resulted in the establishment in 1801 of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Over the next century most of the Irish nationalist leaders, as members of the British Parliament, changed their general approach to solving the Irish Question by trying to bring change—more personal, religious, civil, and political liberty—through constitutional means, often joining with English Liberals at Westminster to bring often slow, but important, incremental changes to their land. But the ultimate goal of the nationalists was home rule, still keeping most military and international relations responsibilities with England, but otherwise having political and economic control over Ireland themselves. Gladstone, with the help of the Irish nationalists, tried to push two Home

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Rule bills (1886 and 1893) through the House of Commons. The first was barely defeated in the House, and the second was passed by the House, only to be rejected by the House of Lords.50 Eventually, in the early 1890s the Conservatives began to regain power and, with the help of Irish Unionists, in the north of Ireland, over the next two decades were able to slow down the momentum toward home rule, trying actually to kill it by kindness—diverting complaints by offering small concessions of economic and land reform to those seeking change. It was during this period that C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, and outwardly the political scene until 1908, when he began his schooling, looked bright for the Protestant Unionists. As a Protestant Unionist, his father Albert, had been much involved in the early political struggles against home rule, but by the 1890s had become more involved in his work as a Belfast solicitor than in national politics.51 The O’Brien’s remark that “the time of troubles seemed to have ended with the Irish nationalists seeming harmless,” sheds light on Albert’s shift in focus, as they further explain that the period from “1890 to 1910 was a kind of Indian Summer” for those opposed to home rule.52 But into that calm came new parliamentary elections in December 1910. The number of seats held by the Conservatives and Unionists together were equal to the number held by the Liberals. The Irish Nationalists, though, had an additional 84 seats that, when given in support of Liberal bills, would then allow them to control what would be done on bills that would affect Ireland. The most important change that the Irish Nationalists initiated was a bill that limited the authority of the House of Lords over bills that had originated in the House of Commons. This bill further limiting the House of Lords became law in August 1911, and it was in its wake that the next home rule bill would become law in 1912.53 Just as international political dominoes began to fall in 1914 as one nation responded to another; so, it did also in Ireland between the Nationalists and Unionists. The Nationalist regaining of power brought an almost instant response of resistance from the Unionists and their leaders. Under the guidance of Albert Lewis’s close neighbor and MP for East Down, Captain James Craig, demonstrations, marches, fiery speeches, parliamentary delaying tactics, and threats of civil disorder became common, especially in Belfast and other north of Ireland communities. The Lewis Papers indicate that these intimidating and public Unionist activities had already begun in 1908 before C. S. Lewis left home to attend his first boarding school in England. For intermingled with Albert’s personal remembrances during Flora’s last days is a comment she made about the Unionist Orangemen and their loud drum playing.54 Then, in September 1911, when the third home rule bill was introduced, 50,000 Unionists marched to Craigavon, Craig’s nearby residence, to hear

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Sir Edward Carson tell them that if “Home Rule” passed, that Protestants themselves must be ready to govern Ulster.55 Over the next year, even though it was passed into law, public opposition to home rule continued to swell, when on September 28, 1912, almost one-half million Unionists signed a covenant on Ulster Day, pledging them never to allow home rule to be imposed on Ireland.56 The Lewis Papers also point out that Albert sent Jack a letter describing the “great doings” of this event, noting that a “bad time” will come to Ulster if the law does go into effect. He let Jack know that, though he supported the covenant, he did not feel comfortable, as an officer of the court, in signing it himself. Moreover, both his integrity and his possible ability to pay for Jack and Warnie’s schooling might be at stake. To him, these were more important than making a commitment to do something about an event (home rule) that may never happen.57 When war did come in 1914, the effective date of the law was delayed, but this did not stop conflict within Ireland. leading soon to the 1916 Easter Monday uprising and eventual civil war almost immediately after World War I had ended. Jack, after an earlier mention of James Craig, remarks in a March 1914 letter to his father that the people at Malvern College do not comprehend the situation in Ulster regarding home rule.58 The Catholic/Protestant connection to this problem would never be simple to explain back then or today either. But Lewis, looking back at his homeland 40 years later, concluded that “the strife, hatred and often civil war between dissenting faiths” there usually develops when “religion is confused with politics.”59 “PUBLIC SCHOOL” EDUCATION IN GREAT BRITAIN: GLANCING BACK AT BOTH DR. GRIMSTONE AND DR. ARNOLD On the evening of September 18, 1908, Jack Lewis boards a steamship in Belfast Harbor and travels overnight with his more experienced brother, Warnie, across the Irish Sea to Fleetwood, England. There in the early morning they begin a southeasterly rail journey first to London, and then, out of Euston Station, they take another train northwest for about thirty more minutes to Wynyard School in the city of Watford, Hertfordshire. Here, that afternoon, begins for Jack in his first boarding school experience, 18 months of the most excruciating days of his life at a school that in Surprised by Joy he named “Belsen,” in a chapter titled, “Concentration Camp.”60 Yes, his brother had already been attending this same school now since May 1905, but Warnie, up to that time, had shared very little personally of what had actually happened to him there. Yes, there had been letters and vacations together—plenty of time to share. Yes, Jack’s parents had taken great

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effort to find the right school—first, for Warnie and then for him. In 1904, Albert had initially contacted W. T. Kirkpatrick, his former teacher, for advice. Kirkpatrick had advised Albert to consider a preparatory school in England, but not in Ireland. He had then written to the well-known educational consultants, Gabbitas and Thring, who had sent him a prospectus on several English preparatory schools that he subsequently contacted. His mother had even made that first trip with Warnie and had outwardly seen as much as a visiting parent was allowed to see on the first day of school. She, with Jack, had even gone a second time with Warnie to deliver him to Watford after their extended summer vacation in France and London in August–September 1907.61 But somehow the difficult reality of it all had never come out until Jack himself was there. He, himself also had difficulty getting the truth of it across to his father. Looking back Jack tries to explain this difficulty—blaming both himself and his father.62 Certainly, his mother deserves some blame as well since she actually visited there twice. Sayer himself a product of a brutal preparatory school, simply writes that this school was “as bad a school as could have existed in England during any period.”63 This state of affairs relating to Jack’s first boarding school, regrettable as it was, can hardly be a fair example of the original intention of the British educational system. If, as Lewis tells us, it was his father’s intention to turn them both into “public school boys,”64 what was it that he had been trying to do for them, but had failed to accomplish or at least the results were not as he had hoped? Part of the difficulty in comprehending the education that students like Lewis experienced in Edwardian England is compounded by a difference in terminology and practice. George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said that “England and America are two nations separated by the same language.” This same communication difficulty arises in comparing American and English schooling and schooling in other cultures as well. Simple nouns like term, form, house, club, prefect, fag, tutor, games, public school, grinder, master, usher, and many more, lose some of their meaning without proper context and interpretation. At the same time, it is also important to consider a system’s history and what its original goals were, especially for the lateVictorian and Edwardian eras. In the early twentieth century there were primarily two means of achieving an education in the United Kingdom. According to the Education Acts of 1870, 1891, and 1902, working class families and the very poor were generally limited to instruction provided free of charge by the state in elementary schools and in state-supported secondary schools. Parents in wealthier middle- and upper-class families were able to provide their young children with either a governess or tutor in their home or would send them as a day student to a nearby private school. There was not necessarily a standard age, but usually

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between the ages of eight to ten children would be sent to a private boarding school, also called a preparatory school. The objective of this school was to prepare them for entrance exams to attend an independent secondary school, called in the Great Britain a public school. The preparatory schools were sometimes owned and managed by a self-governing, non-profit board. But many of these schools, as in the case of the school Jack Lewis named Belsen, provided a living for the headmaster who at the same time owned the school.65 In Surprised by Joy Lewis cites F. Anstey’s book Vice Versa (1882) as “the only truthful school story in existence.”66 This book was written on the pretence that holding and making a wish upon a magical talisman from India, would allow two persons to switch bodies. This happens when the father, Paul Bultitude, says in response to his unhappy and complaining son, Dick, “I only wish, at this very moment, I could be a boy again, like you. Going back to school wouldn’t make me unhappy, I can tell you.”67 Then for three hundred, often hilarious, pages the reader follows Mr. Bultitude’s adventure of learning what it was like for his son to attend Crichton House, Dr. Grimstone’s preparatory school. Much like Belsen and its headmaster, there is terrible food and lodging, impulsive and often cruel verbal and physical discipline, and a lack of real scholarship. Here, also, is the serious reality of not only a terrible school but also of a widowed father and son’s relationship gone wrong. I leave to the reader to search out the possible connections with Lewis’s later writings of the name “Bultitude” and the mention of “Turkish delight” on page ninety-one in this story.68 Also, in his own 1936 autobiography, just as Lewis followed in his example, Anstey did not reveal the name of the preparatory school he attended, nor the name of his headmaster, leaving us to know them only by “Crichton House” and “Dr. Grimstone” as found in Vice Versa.69 The public school was not “public” in the sense that it was supported by public money from the state. But it was public in the sense that if your child passed the entrance exam and the parent could pay the fees for their tuition and living expenses, it was open to the paying public. These feepaying public schools also had their own self-governing board and provided instruction for children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, educating them for entrance into the university or into training for the military service or the foreign service or other professional vocations. Originally started by independent charities offering free education and often connected to the church, by the nineteenth century the public schools had become the schools primarily of the elite in England. They almost always also had the word college attached to their name since the students normally lived “collegiately” there in a dorm. A sometimes useful appendix to the public school was the “grinder” or “crammer.” These were individual tutors, who, in the case of the Lewis

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boys, were sometimes former masters or headmasters like Kirkpatrick who helped students prepare for special examinations after they had completed their public schooling. By the turn of the twentieth century the term “public school boy” had a very specific meaning with a very specific purpose. According to Sayer, Albert and Flora Lewis had three major reasons for sending their sons to a public school. First, if they desired to have a vocation in the government or in the armed services it would give them an advantage over others who had not been to public schools. Second, if they planned on attending Oxford or Cambridge, the public school is where these universities did most of their recruiting. Finally, attending a public school would help them socially, teaching them how to conduct themselves in a way that demonstrated that they were “gentlemen.”70 In volume three of The Lewis Papers, in a letter to Warnie dated January 29, 1910, Albert shares with his 14-year-old son a fourth ambition that he had for both of his children. He mentioned this as something not only that he had wanted for them but also as something that their departed mother had hoped for them. It was related to their schooling. It was also, as already mentioned by Sayer, related to their becoming gentlemen. But it was a certain kind of gentlemen. He told Warnie that his one desire for his boys was to make them into educated gentlemen who were also Christians.71 In fact, looking back upon the history of the British public school, these three qualities were deemed important, not only to the individual, his family, and his school, they were also seen as important to the purposes of the Empire. Writing in 1942 both about the history and future of the public schools, Donald Hughes in The Public Schools and the Future reminded his British readers that the British Empire in the past needed a stream of men who could be relied on to carry responsibility in distant and difficult parts of the earth. Very often this had to be done without supervision and with very little reward. It was necessary then that the servants of the Empire should be conscientious, possessing a sense of responsibility and what we must call for want of a better term “team spirit.” The Public Schools, with all their faults, did provide these men.72

In a 1984 essay on “The Imperturbable British,” Italian author Luigi Barzini came to a similar answer when he asked two important questions: “How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination? And how did they, between the wars, still manage to keep their rickety empire together with little visible effort?”73 In his research he discovered that the leaders that took responsibility for the empire—its security, administration, and development at home and abroad—each of them had

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been nurtured on the same code of behavior in their homes and at their public schools and could be trusted to do what was appropriate and right, no matter how difficult the circumstance.74 Educational historian Edward Mack points to Henry Newbolt’s 1897 poem, “Vitai Lampada” as making this same point. He saw the poem as “a summary of the prewar conservative spirit” as it was applied to former public school cricket players serving in the military in time of war: “Vitai Lampada” There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight— Ten to make and the match to win— A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of the ribboned coat, Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote— “Play up! play up! and play the game!” The sand of the Desert is sodden red— Red with the wreck of a square that broke; The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel’s dead, And the regiment’s blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England’s far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: “Play up! play up! and play the game!” This is the world that year by year, While in her place the school is set, Every one of her sons must hear, And none that hears it dare forget. This they all with joyful mind Bear through life like a torch in flame, And falling fling to the host behind— “Play up! play up! and play the game!”75

Yes, there was to be preparation aiming at responsible, unsupervised future service to the empire and many games of cricket and football that would teach these school boys how to put their team before themselves. But as Norman Vance affirmed in The Sinews of the Spirit (1985), the heart of the public school boy ethos goes back beyond the needs of the empire and compulsory games, to the “muscular Christianity” and “Christian Socialism” of Charles Kingsley Thomas Hughes, and F. D. Maurice, and to the “moral and religious

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interpretation of history” of Thomas Arnold as he brought reform to Rugby School.76 While Lewis wrote of his new friendship with an old neighbor as “Fortune’s Smile,”77 such also were the serendipitous events that brought the nineteenth century’s greatest public school reformer, the Rev. Thomas Arnold to be the headmaster at Rugby School when Thomas Hughes was also a student there from 1833 to 1842. When Arnold came to Rugby in 1828, Mack and Armytage write that the British public schools were generally criticized for “their antiquated curricula, barbarous conditions, and lack of adaptability.”78 What Arnold then took upon himself was the complete transformation of Rugby School. According to Leach, in his tenure at Rugby, “Arnold introduced modern subjects and the prefect system as well as laying a great deal of emphasis on sport as part of his educational program. When Arnold took over the headship of Rugby discipline in the public schools was maintained largely through fear. Arnold wanted to civilize school life and move beyond the focus on classical texts. He was the first headmaster to make chapel the centre of boarding school life.”79 All of this, over a period of nine years, was imparted into Thomas Hughes, who after graduating from Oxford, going on into law, and becoming part of the Christian Socialist movement, published his own version of Arnold’s reforms in the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays in 1857. According to Hughes’s biographers, the primary purpose of Arnold’s reforms at Rugby as revealed through Tom Brown’s Schooldays was to build Christian character: “Be straightforward, honest, and self-reliant, and use your strength and power under God in the service of others. Life is an eternal war between good and evil and the true Christian is the one who manfully devotes his life to co-operating with others in waging this war on the side of right.”80 While other headmasters eventually saw the importance of what was happening at Rugby and, in time, began their own Arnoldian reforms, it was primarily through Tom Brown’s Schooldays that the public itself began to grasp Hughes’s love of Arnold and what public school life had been like at Rugby. As a book, it impacted all later fiction about public schools. But Mack and Armytage suggest that its most powerful impression was made upon the public schools themselves. They write that “[i]t is no exaggeration to say that Tom Brown’s Schooldays made the modern public school. . . . It brought Arnold’s often radical and lofty ideas down to a level that made them vastly appealing to the public.”81 What Hughes had portrayed through his story was the “mundane idea of a group of self-reliant, manly boys tamed into submission to Christian principles.”82 Thus, in preparing public school boys for their future life of serving the Empire, there is now ideally spread over Great Britain in the last half of

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the nineteenth and early twentieth century both a stronger emphasis on team sports and the promotion of a more muscular, self-reliant Christian gentleman. In addition, there was some expansion of the curriculum. But to these were also added Arnold’s scheme for self-government among the students: the prefect system—great in theory, but often replicated as a mere form without the spirit, motivation, and personal mentorship that Arnold had imparted to his sixth form senior boys at Rugby. Simply put, in the prefect or fagging system a junior student—the fag— performs certain duties for a sixth form, senior student—the prefect. The original purpose was to establish self-government among the students and to build leadership, perseverance, and an attitude of sacrificial service to something greater than yourself. A fag’s duties might include such humble tasks as cleaning boots, brushing clothes, serving meals, running errands, making beds, cleaning rooms, and making tea. Failure to complete the requested task could lead to stern discipline, possibly even flogging. Not only did C. S. Lewis attend one of the worse English preparatory schools for two years in Watford, he also had a difficult experience for one year at an excellent public school, Malvern College. When both the amount of time spent at a school or with a tutor is compared to the number of pages that Lewis devoted to discussing that educational experience in Surprised by Joy, Malvern College, while only attended for three terms, actually receives more coverage than the other four places of instruction. Jack came there with great expectations, but soon came to dislike the compulsory games and fagging system so much that he describes himself as feeling exhausted, almost as if he had been forced to work in a factory as a victimized child laborer.83 Warnie had felt just the opposite, having spent four years there, becoming a prefect in his last year and wanting to stay even longer. Just what made the difference between their two experiences at the same school? Why was it negative for one and positive for the other? While he only wrote one chapter about his two years at Wynyard, why would he write almost as much about Malvern College as he did about those positive years with Kirkpatrick? In addition, why would he write almost twice as much about his negative experience at Malvern as he did about his almost three times as long positive experience at Cherbourg? Downing states that it was Malvern’s regimentation, compulsory games, and social structure, plus Lewis’s own priggish attitude toward the other students that made him want to leave.84 White sees Lewis as more of a victim, writing that “Malvern made him feel uncomfortable” so that during his stay there “he remained something of an outsider.”85 Wilson sees Jack’s problems at Malvern rooted in his “anti-English prejudice” and “rapid physical growth,” combined with an inability “to fit into the rough and tumble of life at Malvern.”86 Jacobs also underscores the strong anti-English attitude that Jack

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reveals in his letters home. In fact, he concludes from them the obvious— ”at Malvern Jack seems to have become Irish,”87 refusing to become the stereotypical educated Christian gentleman. Christopher agrees that in those chapters on Malvern College that Lewis portrays himself as a misfit there. But he then takes this observation a step deeper to imply that in these same chapters that Lewis “seems to be reacting to all the British propaganda in favor of public school education—and in a very defensive manner.”88 To Christopher the discussion on the prefect/fagging system and the “bloods/tarts” issue at Malvern, while interesting, adds very little to the storyline of “joy” that will eventually lead us to Lewis conversion. At the beginning of his chapter on Malvern College, Sayer states that Lewis had realized much later in life that he had wrongly “blamed the school for his suffering.” This then often led him to be critical of the public schools in general as he had done in Surprised by Joy.89 If this was so; then, what might be some of the actual causes of the conflicts that Lewis had experienced during his brief but important stay at Malvern College? Sayer notes that a major source of his suffering was his preoccupation with sex.90 Warnie had confronted him about some of the things he had written in Surprised by Joy about Malvern, and he admitted that his perspective had been distorted.91 This was also later confirmed by his former study companion, Donald Hardman.92 A second source of his strife at Malvern was Jack’s perception of the cultural differences between himself and the other students.93 Already mentioned above by Downing, Lewis had admitted this flaw of being a prig in his spiritual autobiography.94 A third basis for his troubles at Malvern was his sense of betrayal from many of Warnie’s friends whom he had also assumed might become his friends but never did.95 It was a misunderstanding, but a misunderstanding that had been a deep blow to his initial expectations as a new student at Malvern. Fourth and final on Sayer’s list of the causes that had brought strife into Jack’s life as a student at Malvern was his own personal psychological baggage that he had carried with him to Malvern—especially the double life he had been living since attending Cherbourg, the still deep grief from his mother’s death, the brokenness in his relationship with his father, the inner moral and religious concerns he still had even though he claimed to be an unbeliever, and many more.96 As I have reviewed the literature on this subject, it seemed to me that the most succinct description of the source of Jack’s problems while attending public school at Malvern College can be found in Warnie’s “Memoir” of his brother. There he simply says that in relationship to his public school experience, Jack was a “square peg in a round hole.”97 As much as Jack had hoped that his stay at the Malvern College would be as positive for him as

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it had been for Warnie, Jack’s personality and gifts just did not fit into the strict confines of public school life, any public school. Warnie goes on to add a final assessment: “The fact is that he should never have been sent to a public school at all. Already at fourteen, his intelligence was such that he would have fitted in better among undergraduates than among schoolboys; and by his temperament he was bound to be a misfit, a heretic, an object of suspicion within the collective-minded and standardizing Public School system.”98 But this is almost going too far, for, as Sayer reminds us of the value of the public school to Albert’s sons,99 Jack would less likely have been accepted to Oxford, received a scholarship there, or become an officer through the O.T.C., if he had not attended Malvern College—a place that his letters tell us clearly that he hated.100 His need to have attended public school is obvious as well to Jack, since he shared with Warnie in January 1917 that he had listed Malvern College on the official form as his implied current place of study. This was, of course, a half-truth since he had been studying with Kirkpatrick in Great Bookham for the last two years.101 Is it not ironic that 14 years after Lewis had left Malvern College, having pleaded so hard with his father to remove him from school, that he was asked by the college authorities to allow his name to be nominated for election to their new board of governors? Somewhat reluctantly he accepted the invitation.102 TRAVELING TO SCHOOL AND BACK VIA STEAMSHIP At the beginning of Chapter 10 in Surprised by Joy, Lewis mentions that as a 16-year-old his memory was filled with “ship’s side images” to an extent that is remarkably rare for such an “untraveled” traveler as he.103 Why might that be? His answer sends the reader back to those first paragraphs of Chapter 2 when, in September 1908, after his mother’s death, he had made his first steamship crossing and railway journey with Warnie to begin boarding school in Watford, Hertfordshire.104 When their school term was over in December, they would then return home, taking the train first to London and then to the Fleetwood boat, arriving back in Belfast about 6:30 a.m. the next morning.105 With three terms a year this would mean crossing the Irish Sea six times a year and doing the same with their travel on the railways. When they both started going to Malvern together in January 1911— Warnie at Malvern College and Jack at Cherbourg—they would take the ferry boat to Liverpool instead of Fleetwood and take the railway directly to Malvern instead of going to London first. When Jack was at Malvern College and Great Bookham, he would generally be on his own because Warnie would either be at Sandhurst or stationed in France. Although when Warnie could get leave, he would sometimes meet Jack, and they would again

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go back to Belfast together by steamship across the Irish Sea. Since Great Bookham was in Surrey just a few miles south of London, he would again travel through London, preferring to use the Fleetwood boat. But during the war he would use whichever one was available.106 By April 1917, when he had finally finished his grinding with Kirkpatrick, Jack would have made at least fifty-two voyages by steamship over the Irish Sea with many more to follow during his later visits back to Ireland from Oxford, both as a student and as a don. One likely product of these many adolescent voyages is the poem “Ships” written in December 1916 while at home in Belfast.107 He had just returned from Oxford after taking his scholarship exams, unsure of how he had done. But while at home he had received the exciting news that he had won a scholarship to University College. King notes that this poem was written about the soul of a ship (line 14), which “reinforced his longing for both heroic adventure and joy.”108 Over his childhood years Jack had developed a great love for the physical landscape of Ulster—the distant hills and mountains, the natural wonders and seaside beaches in County Down and County Antrim. Besides enjoying them for their own beauty, seeing these wonders of nature triggered that distant longing within him for Joy. Now in his boyhood and adolescent years he added to these a love of traveling on the sea, in particular the Irish Sea. He has a moving passage in Surprised by Joy describing how the images and sounds connected with the sea seem to come to life on their own whenever he closes his eyes.109 Another possible reason that Lewis came to love these voyages across the Irish Sea so much was a concept that he had later implanted into an unpublished and unfinished novel that he had written around 1927 or 1928. Designated “The Easley Fragment,” this story is found in Volume 9 of The Lewis Papers.110 Kathryn Lindskoog summarizes its plot in her Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands (2001) where she names it “The Most Substantial People.”111 In the story, a Dr. Easley crosses the Irish Sea on the Liverpool ferry to Belfast. But he discovers that “as soon as one gets on the ferry in Liverpool, one is in Belfast. The food is Irish, the people are Irish, the dialect is Irish, and the manners are Irish.”112 Lewis does refer to the name Easley twice in a November 1916 letter to Arthur Greeves, but little else about it is mentioned.113 Green and Hooper also mention the fragment in passing in their 1974 biography. 114 Possibly for the teenage Lewis, this imaginative concept that Belfast continued all the way across the Irish Sea to the English coast allowed him to consider his own trips in a different way. In his imagination he was able to stay longer within the physical landscape of his homeland. Returning to Belfast he would also be able to imagine that merely stepping onto the ferry shortened

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his trip home. In essence, when he travels on the Irish Sea he had learned to extend the physical landscape that he loved. Considering Lewis’s stay in Great Bookham from just the emotional and familial perspective, Ronald Bresland suggests something similar occurred. Yes, Jack’s experienced an invigorating academic challenge with the “Great Knock.” But within the home atmosphere itself with Louisa Kirkpatrick’s presence, Jack also found there, among these transplanted Ulstermen, his first real spell of sustained happiness since his mother’s death. Bresland states further that Jack’s time with the Kirkpatrick’s was “the home life he never had, or to be more precise, the home life he should have had. The Bookham environment had a distinctively Ulster tinge to it . . . [a] sense of an Ulster outpost in deepest Surrey.”115 WYNYARD: GOING TO SCHOOL FOR THE FIRST TIME In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis begins the narrative of his educational pilgrimage with a chapter entitled, “Concentration Camp.” The imagery of imprisonment and victimization combined with unrelenting emotional, verbal, and physical abuse is overwhelming.116 Naturally, those who have read Chapter 1 know also what has happened in his childhood. How, before the young Lewis was naively to board this sea-going railway car headed for Belsen, he would have had all, except for his brother, that was precious to him taken away—his mother, his home, his church, his beautiful country, and now his father as well.117 Like Corrie and Betsie ten Boom in real concentration camp at Ravensbruck,118 all they would now have for the next three months was each other and the memories of the Edenic childhood that they lost. Even to take this journey he would have been made to wear easily identifiable prison uniforms—their uncomfortable school clothes.119 Further into the story we discover with Jack that Belsen is in “flat, flinty, yellow-soiled” Hertfordshire and that Camp Belsen had a warden whom he would quickly discover was living in a “solitude of power.”120 Supposedly a minister and a teacher, he taught little that was retained by his students and ministers—only a cane to the bottoms of any who happened to intersect with his impulsive cruelty. While there Lewis did not experience the cane himself, but what he saw and heard left a deep impression on his memory. And while Lewis tells us that Belsen, in the end, did not do him much harm,121 anyone who has experienced such cruelty and abuse knows differently and so did Lewis—for, in a July 1963 letter to Mary Shelburne, just four months before his death, Lewis informs her that it had taken him over 50 years to finally forgive Wynyard Headmaster Robert Capron and have it out of his mind.122 The comparison of Capron aka “Oldie” with Dr. Grimstone in Vice Versa has already been mentioned above. Hooper has two excellent and accessible

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biographical sketches of Capron that give the reader more understanding of this irrational, unpredictable, and insane man, but I know of no published photograph of him. Both of Hooper’s essays include Warnie’s remembrances of Capron from The Lewis Letters.123 First in 1998124 and again in 2001125 King published a twenty-one-line biographical poem on Robert Capron by C. S. Lewis. The first line begins “Heart-breaking school received me,” and the author twice notes that Capron needed forgiveness. Originally written in the early 1920s while he was attending Oxford, Lewis is able to share both his strong negative feelings about Capron and yet also show what King notes as “a surprising objectivity.”126 Further commenting on Capron, Downing suggests that Lewis also turned this cruel headmaster into the buffoon portrayed as Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew.127 Not only was the man an unreasonable, violent, and abusive teacher, his facilities and the food he served left a lot to be desired. Hooper128 gives a brief depiction of the school, again using more of Warnie’s account found in The Lewis Papers.129 Warnie was quite critical of the unsanitary conditions and the nauseating odors that came from the iron shed. Photographs of the now demolished building can be seen in Through Joy and Beyond130 and in C.S. Lewis: Images of His World.131 But even in the depths of despair, when his father would not listen to either his or Warnie’s complaints about this insane man and their desire to leave, there were still several positive things that happened. First, Jack became more sociable with his fellow students. In the difficult times against their common enemy, he and Warnie and the other students learned what it meant to hold on together through thick and thin.132 Secondly, Jack, through his contact with St. John’s Church in Watford, became more than the nominal believer that he had been in Belfast at St. Mark’s. Listening twice each Sunday to the vigorous preaching of Vicar Reggie James, he began at Wynyard to take his childhood faith more seriously— praying, reading his Bible, and attempting to obey his conscience.133 Sadly, without personal mentoring where he could ask questions or share his doubts, his attempts to grow in his faith eventually caused him more problems than it helped. Where as a child he had thought of God as being more like a magician to whom his prayers might make his mother well or bring her back to life,134 at Wynyard his very earnestness made his prayer life a burden instead of a joy. Yes, he heard James preach the great doctrines of the faith. But, in his personal response of fear and guilt, he experienced God more as a judge watching over his every thought and questioning his every motive instead of as a loving heavenly father who desired to have a personal relationship with him even if he was a prodigal. As a result, answers to his prayers now

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became his joyless responsibility—what he said, how he said them, and why he said them.135 Possibly this approach to his faith had more to do with his difficult relationship with his own earthly father than to what he was hearing on Sunday at St John’s. It is possible also that St. John’s Anglo-Catholic focus on solemn outward ceremony and form—the candles, the bells, the altar, the rood screen, the incense, the crucifix, the virgin, the tabernacle for the host, etc.—maybe good in themselves –but may not have been what the lonely 10- to 11-year-old Jack needed at this time. St. John’s is still a functioning Anglo-Catholic parish in Watford. Thirdly, in spite of the otherwise lack of intellectual stimulation, decline in his imaginative life and the reading of rubbish school stories, Capron did help him in one important area: he learned geometry from him, and it began to teach him how to think and reason. He enjoyed reading H. Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells, especially the science fiction stories. But intellectually, his two years at Wynyard was mostly wasted; moreover, experiences of Joy no longer came to him as in his childhood.136 Finally, looking back through the years, Lewis could see that that the coming and going of each term and its breaks and the return from those breaks provided for the students at Wynyard a way to learn how to live by hope. It was a cycle that they faced at least three times a year—counting so many days before dreaded day of return comes when students must leave home and travel into the horrors of Oldie’s classroom. But from the moment they arrived, they had on their calendars a day-by-day update of how many days were left in the term. The term would soon end and hope began to work its way even into the most difficult of places like Wynyard. Soon there would be no more canes or caning, no verbal abuse, no unpalatable food, no stench, no cold beds or cold baths.137 BACK HOME WITH ALBERT AND WARNIE AT “LITTLE LEA” In December, April, and July, Jack and Warnie always looked forward to coming home to Little Lea, but not necessarily to be with their father Albert, but to be with each other. What they especially enjoyed at home were those hours during the day when Albert was at work, somewhere between nine o’clock in the morning and six o’clock in the evening, when they could do almost anything they could come up with—write their Boxen stories in the “Little End Room,” read, go for walks and bicycle rides over the Holywood Hills, play in the garden, and visit with their Ewart cousins at Glenmachen. Moreover, they also enjoyed going out in the evening with their father to the Hippodrome Music Hall in Belfast and the good food prepared there at Little

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Lea.138 What they did not enjoy were the intrusions that others tried to make into their few days out of school—obligations made for them by their father and others for dances, parties, and various social events, for at these Jack was much more ill at ease than Warnie.139 But they also did not generally enjoy being with their father during his off work hours at Little Lea. Yes, he was a good provider of all of their material and educational needs. Yes, he sent letters and money to them while they were away at school. Yes, he saw that they went to church and attended local social events and met the right people in Ulster. Yes, he truly cared for them and wanted to know all about what they thought and did when they were away from him. Yes, he had been a good husband to their mother, Flora. Yes, the grief associated with Flora’s death had hit all of them hard and, in one sense, it drew them closer because of their common loss. But what Jack saw happening and experienced was that upon his mother’s death they had lost not only her. For in the midst of Albert’s own suffering and grief, they had loss their father as well and within a few weeks were both sent hundreds of miles away to school.140 Our hearts sympathize with Albert as he tries to raise two growing boys on his own. Children are never easy to rear even with two loving parents. In Surprised by Joy, Jack often is very critical of his father. Sayer sometimes tries to balance this tendency.141 But something else was going on in this parent–child relationship. During their early school days, as Jack and Warnie were growing closer, out of need, to one another, they were also growing apart from their father as they were naturally “spreading their own wings.” Moreover, without them being around him on a regular basis, Albert had possibly forgotten how to relate to them. They were changing while they were away, becoming those “educated gentlemen” that he had hoped for them to become, but doing much of it away from him most of the year. It is clear that when they were being disciplined by him at home, Albert often forgot to leave behind the way he worked in the courts and at political rallies as a public speaker. Overwhelming your children with your rhetorical and dramatic ability and haranguing them will not change them nor draw them closer to you. First, it brings fear and insecurity into the relationship. Then, it becomes a comedy to them. The result is that trying to control someone verbally merely pushes them away from you. In fact, Jack writes that Albert’s verbal methods of discipline made him sound like “an angry Irishman”—voicing to them threats of abandonment.142 Other things may also concern us about Albert and his relationship to his boys. When Jack and Warnie were trying to communicate to him about the horrors of Wynyard, Jack lets slip out the comment that his father was “a man not easily informed.” He tells us also that to his children Albert had an active

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mind, but not a listening mind.143 Later, in Surprised by Joy, Jack composes a whole litany of Albert’s relational faults in communicating with his sons: 1. expecting your children to share everything they are thinking and doing with you, 2. asking questions over and over without listening to their answer, 3. trying to “read between the lines,” 4. treating your children as your brothers and friends instead of as your sons.

The litany goes on.144 In some ways when all of these comments in Jack’s portrait of his father are put together, it almost sounds like father-bashing on his part. Some might also call it “airing your family’s dirty linen in public.” And yet, we must also remember that Warnie never denied any of Jack’s comments about their father as he had denied Jack’s comments about Malvern College in the same book. Who knows what Lewis was thinking 50 years ago when he wrote about this perplexity in his home? He is the one who went through what he has told us. Likewise, who knows what was really going on in Albert’s mind when he was trying to relate to Jack and Warnie? In many ways it has the ring of “bullying,” not unlike Capron’s actions with his students but without the physical caning that went with it—for from Jack’s viewpoint, Albert was controlling, had to know everything, allowed no boundaries between himself and the boys, tended to focus on rules and what he thought was right instead of on the needs of the person, and constantly lectured them over and over. Possibly for Albert it was just a method that he had found helpful in one part of his life—the police court—but could not accept that it would not be successful in dealing with his family as well. It is hard for anyone to break habits that they have learned over many years. It is also difficult to admit that we have hurt those that we love by what we say to them. In his diary in 1967, Warnie himself conjectures that their father was merely an example of the stereotypical Ulster father portrayed in The Ulsterman (1914) as someone who treated his sons worse than he treated his errand boy. Warnie quotes a portion of the story where the son is cross-examined about his every thought, activity, and use of time by his father.145 On May 10, 1905, just five weeks before his tenth birthday, Warnie Lewis left Belfast on the Fleetwood ferry with his mother Flora, headed for the English coast and his first boarding school. Named Wynyard, it was located in Watford, Hertfordshire, just on the northwest edge of London. Even though he was three years older than Jack, the boys both always related to each other on equal terms. Little did either of them know that their parting at this poignant stage of Jack’s development would soon hasten childhood’s end for both.

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NOTES 1. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 219; and C. S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume 2, Books, Broadcasts and War (1931-1949), ed., Walter Hooper (London: Harper Collins, 2004), 877. 2. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), vii–viii. 3. Ibid., 3. 4. Ibid., 21. 5. Ibid., 71–72. 6. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: The Centenary Press, 1940), 26. 7. C. S. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser” in Fifteen Poets (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 40–43, reprinted as “On Reading The Faerie Queene” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 146–148. 8. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1—Family Letters, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 144, 146–147, 151–153, 157, 161, 169–170. 9. C. S. Lewis, “My First School.” in Time and Tide, XXIV (September 4, 1943): 717, reprinted in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 23–26. 10. C. S. Lewis, Preface in George MacDonald: 365 Readings, ed. with a preface by C. S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1947, 1986), xxxii–xxxiii. 11. Anonymous. “C.S. Lewis.” in Current Biography 1944, ed. Anna Rothe (New York: H.W. Wilson, Co., 1944), 411–412. 12. Anonymous, “Don vs. Devil” Time 50(September 8, 1947): 65–74. 13. Chad Walsh, Apostle to the Skeptics. New York: MacMillan, 1949, 1–10. 14. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 219. 15. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 22–181. [These ten chapters are titled—2. Concentration Camp; 3. Mountbracken and Campbell; 4. I Broaden My Mind; 5. Renaissance; 6. Bloodery; 7. Light and Shade; 8. Release; 9. The Great Knock; 10. Fortune’s Smile; and 11. Check.] 16. C. S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a memoir by W. H. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 1–8, 27–34. [One additional letter to Arthur Greeves about Jack’s religious beliefs is later added to the revised and enlarged edition of this portion of the book: Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. revised and enlarged, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 47–55.] 17. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 25–49. 18. W. H. Lewis, ed., The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 18501930, Volumes 3–5, Leeborough Press, 1933. Unpublished manuscripts held by The

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Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, and also on microfilm at The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford, England, 33 19. Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, 8–9. 20. C. S. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 47–178. 21. Walter Hooper, Introduction in They Stand Together, 16, and Introduction in C. S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis. ed. with a memoir by W. H. Lewis, rev. and enlarged, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 10– 11. 22. A. N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990; White, Michael. C.S. Lewis: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004; Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005). 23. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 55–121. 24. Ibid., 82, 89. 25. Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life: The Life Story of C.S. Lewis (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2005), vii–viii; and Alan Jacobs, “Briefly Noted.” in First Things 48 (December 1994): 64. 26. John Bremer, “Clive Staples Lewis, 1898-1963: A Brief Biography” in The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 9–65. 27. Ibid., “George Sydney Benedict Sayer,” 362, 99. 28. Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 617–743, 747–797. 29. Walter Hooper, Biographical Appendix, in C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1—Family Letters, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 978– 1024. 30. Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr., ed., The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998). 31. Ruth James Cording, C.S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life. (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2000), 98–99. 32. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, London: HarperCollins, 1994, 229–242. 33. Don King, “Glints of Light: The Unpublished Short Poetry of C.S. Lewis” in Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 15 (1998): 73–96. 34. Don King, C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002, 245–269, 364–365, 308–309. 35. Ibid., 28–34, 39–44. 36. Don King, “C. S. Lewis’ The Quest of Bleheris as Prose Poetry” in The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 23, 1:(Spring 1999): 3–15; and Downing, David, “The Dungeon of His Soul”: Lewis’s Unfinished “Quest of Bleheris,” Seven: An Anglo-American Review, 17 (1998): 37–54. [Downing’s article became a chapter in

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his book, The Most Reluctant Convert: C.S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2002, 63–80. 37. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1—Family Letters, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 6–295. 38. Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism: 1871-1900 (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1963), 18. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 5–6, 12, 216–241. 41. Ibid., 33–34. 42. R. R. Palmer and Joel Cotton, A History of the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 667–670. 43. Walter Hooper, Editorial Insert, Collected Letters: Volume 1, 73; and Jacobs, Narnian, 59–60. 44. Sayer. Jack, 119. 45. Jacobs, Narnian, 60, 62. 46. Wilson, Biography, 39. 47. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1, 69–295. [See specific letters below.] 48. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, Volume 5, 79. 49. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 158–159. 50. Maire O’Brien and Conor Cruse O’Brien. The Story of Ireland (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 61, 76, 89–90, 119. 51. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, Volume 2, 119, 219–239, 243–247. 52. O’Brien and O’Brien, The Story of Ireland, 133. 53. Jeremy Smith. Britain and Ireland: From Home Rule to Independence (Essex, England: Pearson Education Unlimited, 2000), 59–62. 54. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, Volume 3, 120, reprinted in Wilson, Biography, 20. 55. A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 47–48. 56. Ibid., 62, 66. 57. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, Volume 3, 293–295; and also discussed in Bresland, Ronald W. The Backward Glance: C.S. Lewis and Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1999), 29. 58. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1, 51–52. 59. C. S. Lewis The Latin letters of C.S. Lewis to Don Giovanni (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1988), 83. 60. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 22–24. 61. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, Volume 3, 25, 32–34, 51, 71–75, 80–84. 62. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 30–31. 63. Sayer, Jack, 47. 64. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 127. 65. Reed, John R. Old School Ties: The Public School in British Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1964), 3.

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66. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 127. 67. Anstey, F., aka Thomas Anstey Guthrie, Vice Versa (New York: Penguin Books, 1882, 1981), 25, 30, 33–36. 68. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 2—Books, Broadcasts and War (1931– 1949), ed. Walter Hooper. (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 84, 342, 543–544, 682, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 31–42. 69. Anstey, F., aka Thomas Anstey Guthrie, A Long Retrospect (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 45–70. 70. Sayer, Jack, 56–57. 71. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, Volume 3, 199. 72. Donald Hughes, The Public Schools and the Future (London: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 50–51. 73. Luigi Barzini, The Europeans (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984), 47. 74. Ibid., 53–54. 75. Edward C. Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion Since 1860: The Relationship between Contemporary Ideas and the Evolution of an English Institution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 253–254. 76. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 53, 76. 77. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 149–164. 78. Edward C. Mack, and W. H. G. Armytage. Thomas Hughes: The Life of the Author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1952), 15. 79. Camilla Leach, “The History of the Relationship between Religion and the Development of Education in England: Thomas Arnold,” University of Winchester, Education Studies (ES2216: Religion and Education), last updated October 25, 2005, http://www2.winchester.ac.uk/edstudies/courses/level%20two/es2216w4.htm. 80. Mack and Armytage, Thomas Hughes, 96. 81. Ibid., 92–93, 100. 82. Ibid., 100–101. 83. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 83, 96. 84. Downing, Most Reluctant Convert, 50. 85. White, C.S. Lewis: A Life, 32. 86. Wilson, C.S. Lewis, 33–34. 87. Jacobs, Narnian, 33. 88. Christopher, Joe R., C.S. Lewis (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 18. 89. Sayer, Jack, 79. 90. Ibid., 79. 91. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of C.S. Lewis” in Letters of C.S. Lewis (1988), 25. 92. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 297–298; and Sayer, Jack, 84–85. 93. Sayer, Jack, 80.

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94. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 101–105. 95. Sayer, Jack, 83. 96. Ibid., 84. 97. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of C.S. Lewis” in Letters of C.S. Lewis (1988), 24. 98. Ibid., 25. 99. Sayer, Jack, 56–57. 100. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1, 48, 50–54, 59, 61–62, 66–67. 101. Ibid., 265. 102. Ibid., Volume 2, 802–803. 103. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 149. 104. Ibid., 22–23. 105. The Lewis Papers, Volume 3, 156. 106. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1, 113, 177, 217. 107. Ibid., The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 238–239. 108. Don King, C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002), 47–48. 109. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 149. 110. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers, Volume 9, 291–300. 111. Kathryn Lindskoog, Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 125–141. 112. Lindskoog, Sleuthing, 134. 113. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1, 260. 114. Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, 94. 115. Bresland, The Backward Glance, 42. 116. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 22–28. 117. Ibid., 18–21. 118. Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place (Washington Depot, CT: Chosen Books, 1971), 172–199. 119. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 22. 120. Ibid., 24. 121. Ibid., 31. 122. Ibid., Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 117. 123. Hooper, Companion and Guide, 638–640, and Biographical Appendix in Collected Letters: Volume 1, 982–984. 124. Don King, “Glints of Light: The Unpublished Short Poetry of C.S. Lewis” in Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 15 (1998): 73–96. 125. Ibid. C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002, 98–99, 285–286. 126. Ibid., 98–99. 127. Downing, Most Reluctant Convert, 38–39.

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128. Hooper, Companion and Guide, 796–797. 129. W. H. Lewis, The Lewis Papers: Volume 3, 34–35. 130. Walter Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C.S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 24–25. 131. Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby, C.S. Lewis: Images of His World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 106. 132. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 31. 133. Ibid., 33–34. 134. Ibid., 20–21. 135. Ibid., 61–62. 136. Ibid., 34–35 137. Ibid., 36–37. 138. Ibid., 57–58. 139. Ibid., 47–49. 140. Ibid., 19. 141. Ibid., 43–45, 55–57. 142. Ibid., 37–40. 143. Ibid., 30. 144. Ibid., 119–125. 145. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 278–279.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anonymous. “C.S. Lewis.” Current Biography 1944. Edited by Anna Rothe. New York: H.W. Wilson, Co., 1944. ———. “Don vs. Devil” Time 50 (September 8, 1947): 65–74. (Note: Four full pages of this article are advertisements.) Anstey, F. aka Thomas Anstey Guthrie. A Long Retrospect. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. ———. Vice Versa. New York: Penguin Books, 1882. Barzini, Luigi. The Europeans. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984. Bremer, John. “Clive Staples Lewis, 1898-1963: A Brief Biography.” In The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. ———. “George Sydney Benedict Sayer” The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. Christopher, Joe R. C.S. Lewis. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. Cording, Ruth James. C.S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2000. Downing, David. “ ‘The Dungeon of His Soul’: Lewis’s Unfinished ‘Quest of Bleheris,’ ” Seven: An Anglo-American Review, 17 (1998).

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———. The Most Reluctant Convert: C.S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002. Gilbert, Douglas and Clyde S. Kilby. C.S. Lewis: Images of His World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Gresham, Douglas. Jack’s Life: The Life Story of C.S. Lewis. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2005. Hayes, Carlton J. H. A Generation of Materialism: 1871–1900. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. Hooper, Walter. Biographical Appendix. In C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume 1—Family Letters. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. Introduction in C. S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis. Edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. Revised and enlarged. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988. ———. Introduction in C. S. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963). Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1979. ———. Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C.S. Lewis. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Hughes, Donald. The Public Schools and the Future. London: Cambridge University Press, 1942. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005. King, Don. C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002. ———. “C. S. Lewis’ The Quest of Bleheris as Prose Poetry” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 23(1) (Spring 1999). ———. “Glints of Light: The Unpublished Short Poetry of C.S. Lewis.” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 15 (1998). Leach, Camilla. “The History of the Relationship between Religion and the Development of Education in England: Thomas Arnold.” University of Winchester, Education Studies (ES2216: Religion and Education). Last updated October 25, 2005. http://www2.winchester.ac.uk/edstudies/courses/level%20two/ es2216w4.htm (accessed Augustt 10, 2006). Lewis, C. S. C.S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume 2, Books, Broadcasts and War (1931– 1949). Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. Collected Letters: Volume 1—Family Letters (1905–1931). Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 1994. ———. “Edmund Spenser” In Fifteen Poets. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.

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———. The Latin letters of C.S. Lewis to Don Giovanni. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1988. ———. Letters of C.S. Lewis. Edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. ———. Letters of C.S. Lewis. Edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis. Revised and enlarged. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988. ———. Letters to an American Lady. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. “My First School.” Time and Tide, XXIV (September 4, 1943): 717. ———. Preface in George MacDonald: 365 Readings. Edited with a preface by C. S. Lewis. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1986. ———. Present Concerns. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. ———. The Problem of Pain. London: The Centenary Press, 1940. ———. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, 1995. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955. ———. They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963). Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Lewis, W. H., Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. ———, ed. The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930, Volumes 2–5, 9. Leeborough Press, 1933. Unpublished manuscripts held by The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, and also on microfilm at The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford, England. Lindskoog, Kathryn. Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001. Mack, Edward C. Public Schools and British Opinion Since 1860: The Relationship between Contemporary Ideas and the Evolution of an English Institution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Mack, Edward C. and W. H. G. Armytage. Thomas Hughes: The Life of the Author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1952. Moore, Frank Frankfort. The Ulsterman: A Story of Today. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1914. O’Brien, Maire and Conor Cruse O’Brien. The Story of Ireland. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Palmer, R. R. and Colton Joel. A History of the Modern World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. Reed, John R. Old School Ties: The Public School in British Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1964.

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Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994. Schultz, Jeffrey D. and John G. West, Jr., eds. The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. Smith, Jeremy. Britain and Ireland: From Home Rule to Independence. Essex, England: Pearson Education Unlimited, 2000. Stewart, A. T. Q. The Ulster Crisis. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. ten Boom, Corrie. The Hiding Place. Washington Depot, CT: Chosen Books, 1971. Vance, Norman. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Walsh, Chad. C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics. New York: MacMillan, 1949. White, Michael. C.S. Lewis: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004. Wilson, A. N. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.

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4

Lewis and Military Service: War and Remembrance (1917–1918) Colin Duriez

During World War One, or The Great War, as it was called before World War II, one out of every eight men drawn into the conflict from Britain died.1 Recruits from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, along with others from Britain’s social elite, had a very much higher death rate than the average recruit. This is because most became junior officers, leading assaults and operations against the enemy, making them particularly vulnerable.2 C. S. Lewis, privately educated and from a privileged Belfast background, turned eighteen near the end of 1916. The path before him was one of very basic and brief officer training based at Oxford University, and then posting to the battle front. His prospects of survival were poor. While training he was part of a close set of six young men, four of whom were to die in the conflict. The remaining two would be injured, Lewis badly. A promise Lewis made to one of those who died was to shape his life. Furthermore, the experience of war was to mould his basic ideas about the nature of the universe and a central theme of his writings, that of a cosmic war forming a larger context for human battles, whether strife within the individual human soul or bloody conflicts between states. The First World War between 1914 and 1918 took in most of Europe, along with Russia, the United States (after 1917), the Middle East, and other areas of the world. The Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, were in conflict against the Allies, including

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France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Before being dwarfed by the savagery of the Second World War it ranked as probably the most destructive and horrific war in history. It resulted in the collapse of four imperial dynasties, and a revolution in Russia, and created the conditions that eventually led to World War II. Soon after David Lloyd George took over leadership of the British coalition parliament, he restated the British war aims on January 5, 1917: “We had to join in the struggle or stand aside and see Europe go under and brute force triumph over public right and international justice. It was only the realization of that dreadful alternative that forced the British people into the war.”3 It was soon after his statement, and for similar reasons, that the United States entered the first global war in the history of humanity. PRELUDE TO WAR EXPERIENCE Although Lewis did not train for and then embark for war until 1917, it was impossible for him not to be touched by the conflict before then. Most immediately his older brother Warren, who was also his friend and confidante, entered the war early on, and periodically returned from France on leave. In February of 1914, months before war was declared, Warren entered the prestigious Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in England after passing twentyfirst out of 201 successful candidates. At that time Lewis was still at Malvern College, though deeply unhappy, a state that was to decide his father, Albert, to put him under the tutorage of W. T. Kirkpatrick, the “Great Knock.”4 On Sunday June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne— then one of the world’s superpowers—visited Sarajevo, in the Balkans. There Archduke Franz Ferdinard was assassinated, along with his wife, the Duchess of Hohenburg, the event precipitating a crisis that would lead to world war. Less than a month later Austria made war almost inevitable by issuing impossible demands upon Serbia, in the wake of the assassination. Subsequent British attempts to mediate were dismissed as insolent by the German Kaiser. Shortly after, on August 4, Germany invaded Belgium, and Britain declared war. Within hours five superpowers were at war—the Austro-Hungarians, the Germans, the Russians, the French, and the British, divided into two alignments. The following day, while home in Ireland on leave visiting his brother and father, Warren was recalled to Sandhurst, his period of training sharply curtailed. Less than two weeks later, the British Expeditionary Force landed in France, which Britain had promised to defend. The following month, Lewis began his studies with Kirkpatrick in a large rural village, Bookham in Surrey, knowing that Warren was likely soon to be in France. The Kirkpatricks lived in a cottage called “Gastons.”

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On October 1, Warren was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps. Lewis noted in a letter to his father that “war fever” was raging around the Bookham neighborhood.5 A little over fortnight later, Lewis further reported to his father that the village was fussing about with a scheme to prepare a cottage for Belgium refugees. With the rapid German push into Belgium tens of thousands of refugees had poured into England. Mrs. Kirkpatrick and the teenager visited the family of seven refugees now installed in the cottage the village had prepared. Lewis was able to communicate a little in schoolboy French, with the help of a stilted phrasebook.6 Among the refugee family was a girl apparently about his age for whom he soon developed a crush, the development of which he shared in his letters to his Ulster friend Arthur Greeves in sometimes embroidered detail.7 The “brown girl” of his story, The Pilgrim’s Regress, may owe something to his sexual fantasies about her at this time. The important fact is that he was emotionally attached to a war victim, making detachment from the conflict impossible. The following month, on November 4, 1914, Warren crossed to France, where he served for the rest of the war. At first he was attached to the 4th Company 7th Divisional Train BEF (British Expeditionary Force), based at Le Havre, well away from the front line. Because of the nature of his servicing role, he was rarely exposed to the kind of dangers faced by those at the front, though he was aware of the huge casualties, and the dangers his brother would face when the time came for him to serve. Early in 1915 the war situation briefly had taken on an amusing turn for Lewis. The unfortunate village curate, unwary of Kirkpatrick’s fierce and uncompromising logic, called in to “Gastons” at afternoon teatime. Lewis reported that the clergyman told several “patriotic lies” about the Germans and Germany.8 Allowing him to finish, Kirkpatrick calmly proved point by point that the statements the curate made were not only fallacious and impossible, but also ridiculous. Lewis and the rest of the tea-drinkers enjoyed Kirkpatrick’s procedure “hugeously.” In early February, 1915, Warren had his first leave from France—a week. Lewis was allowed by Kirkpatrick to visit his home in Little Lea in Belfast with him. This and other leave visits (such as a week’s in July that year) would have made Lewis very much aware of the reality of the war, even if Warren gave an edited version of its horrors. Some weeks later, the reality of the impact of the conflict would have come home to Lewis again. A serviceman, Gerald Smythe, who had recently lost an arm in battle, stayed at “Gastons.” “He has only been up from his bed for a week, yet planned to return to the front the next week. Gerald had even learnt to light his pipe with one hand,” Lewis noted.9 Gerald’s example was likely to have been one of many factors

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that led to Lewis’s eventual resolve to enlist and fight—as an Irish citizen he knew that he was likely to be exempt from conscription, and therefore enlistment would be voluntary. In June 1915 there was the first Zeppelin attack on London. When the airships bombed Waterloo Station, Lewis and the Kirkpatricks were able to see from Bookham electric flashes in the skies as a result of the bomb explosions. This was another indication to the young Lewis of the reality and threats of modern warfare. During the summer of that year Lewis spent an uncomfortable evening. A “theatrical lady,” a young woman called Miss McMullen, was staying with the Kirkpatricks at that time. Lewis was commandeered by her as a dummy for bandage practise, as Miss McMullan prepared for her part in the war. He was, in turn, treated for a broken arm, sprained ankle, and head wound. In February, 1916, the new Military Service Act that came into force (bringing in conscription) caused much discussion in Lewis’s family. It only partly clarified the situation of an Irishman like Lewis in residence in Great Britain. Included among those obligated to serve, the Act stated, was every male British subject who, on the fifteenth day of August 1915 1. was ordinarily resident in Great Britain; 2. had attained the age of 18 years and had not attained the age of 41 years; and 3. was unmarried or was a widower without children dependent on him.10

Because he was an Irish resident, Lewis seemed to be excluded from the obligation as being among those who are “resident in Great Britain for the purpose only of their education or for some other purpose.” Over many ensuing months, as the issue of exemptions for Irishmen was debated nationally, Lewis, the resolute teenager, determined, contrary to the wishes of his father, Albert, that he would enlist even if exempt from conscription. He decided on a strategy of trying to enter Oxford University, which, it gradually emerged, would enable him to join the Officers’ Training Corps and get a commission as soon as his papers come through.11 In June that year Lewis, along with his compatriots, became horrified to learn that Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, had died with all the crew of the British Cruiser, the Hampshire, when it was sunk by a German submarine. Concerned about the import of the event Lewis wondered, in a later letter to Albert, what this great loss would mean for the war. Worse news was to follow, however, as the summer was dominated by the Battle of the Somme. Two of Lewis’s future friends, who were to play an integral role in his conversion to Christianity, served in that conflict—J. R. R. Tolkien and H. V. D. “Hugo” Dyson. British casualties for August alone were 127,000. Two and a half months into the battle, tanks were used for the first time,

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changing the nature of warfare (along with the use of poison gas, one prime effect being terror among troops). It is clear that Lewis was continually aware of events in the theaters of war, particularly in France. France for him was not an abstract concept; he and Warren had shared a memorable holiday with their mother, Flora, in 1907, in a French coastal town not far from some of the places made familiar by the war. The conflict, however, failed to erode his deep happiness under the tutelage of W. T. Kirkpatrick. For the last part of 1916, Lewis’s thoughts and anxieties were focused upon passing the entrance exam for Oxford University. For him everything was at stake, as he saw no alternative to an academic career, and it also provided a good entry into Officer training, after establishing a future place in the academic world. In December 1916, Lewis accordingly made his first trip to Oxford to take a scholarship examination. This took place between December 5 and 9. Passed over by New College, he received a classical scholarship to University College, Oxford. Now only his university-wide entrance examinations (responsions) remained to take. A few days later The Times listed amongst the successful candidates, besides “Clive S. Lewis, University College,” several who one day were to be among his closest friends—“Alfred C. Harwood, Christ Church,” and “Arthur Owen Barfield, Wadham College.” By this time, Britain had been at war with Germany for nearly two and a half years. PREPARATION AND PARTICIPATION IN WAR Lewis’s success in gaining a scholarship at University College was a decisive moment for his future. The goal of scholarship now seemed achievable, though the hurdle of responsions—the University entrance examinations—still lay ahead, and Lewis was well aware of his weakness in mathematics. In a letter to Albert, while Lewis was on Christmas vacation at Little Lea with his father, W. T. Kirkpatrick pointed out that in responsions mathematics “form an important element” and that his son “could very well usefully employ a good part of the day in working up a subject for which he has not only no taste, but on the contrary a distinct aversion.”12 Shortly after, in a letter to Warren in France, Lewis described his impression of his recent visit to Oxford as “absolutely topping”; he was “awfully bucked” with it.13 He was longing, he said, to start his studies there. In the meantime he was going back to “the Knock” (Kirkpatrick) to prepare for responsions. His return journey to Oxford was badly disrupted by the wartime conditions—from where he would continue to Bookham for further studies with Kirkpatrick after visiting his new college the next day. He probably was aware of disapproving glances as he travelled; as he was not wearing military

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uniform, people would have wondered why he was not serving on the front. His height and build would have made him look a little older than his years, and besides, many men in uniform still looked like mere boys. Soon after arriving back with his private tutor, Lewis dropped the study of German in favor of Italian. The idea was to master it in seven weeks. This was so that he would have another language in case he failed the Oxford entrance examination and had to try for the Foreign Office for employment. The possibility of failure was not the only topic of conversation in “Gastons”: the prospect of America coming into the war was becoming much more credible, increasing the likelihood of victory and the end of the conflict. (President Woodrow Wilson, on behalf of the United States, in fact, declared war on Germany on April 2, 1917. Four days earlier, before a joint session of Congress, President Wilson had said: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”) The household at “Gastons” was now suffering increasingly from food rationing. This had much to do with the impact upon shipping by German submarines, a daily topic of conversation in the household. Particularly hard-hitting was the shortages of bread and potatoes. Lewis’s letters of the time give insights into his daily life and concerns. As the date of the entrance examinations loomed Lewis realized suddenly that he had left behind in Belfast the waistcoat of his new brown suit—which he would need to wear for the exams. He wrote to Albert, asking to send it. Around this time he also spent a morning exploring the second-hand bookshops of Charing Cross Road, in nearby London. He was particularly hunting down foreign-language books for his studies and interests, made scarce (with the exception of French) by the war. In March, 1917, Lewis took responsions, but, as feared by his tutor, duly failed in mathematics, particularly algebra. In spite of being “ploughed” in the university entrance examinations he was allowed to come into residence at University College in the Trinity or summer term. This allowed him to start his passage into the army by way of the University Officers’ Training Corps. Though he went for further algebra lessons to John E. Campbell of Hertford College, who had offered to assist him, he was never to pass responsions. By a bizarre irony Lewis—perhaps one of the most brilliant minds ever to study at Oxford—would have been barred from entering the university if it had not been for his eventual war service, ex-servicemen being exempted from having to pass the examination. He was officially a student without requirements of formal studies from April 26 until September 1917. Despite evidence of the impact of war everywhere, Lewis spent a pleasant few months. He enjoyed the library of the Oxford Union, punted on the River Cherwell, or swam in it. Most of University College building was taken up with serving as an army hospital. In all

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of the colleges making up Oxford University there were merely 315 students in residence. Among these a large proportion, about 120, were members of the Officers’ Training Corps. He was very much aware of the general absence of undergraduates in Oxford, and other marks of war in the unusually quiet town. In one of his many letters to his father he commented on the troublesome Flying Corps cadets in Oxford who, he said, like most people caught up in danger, “eat, drink, and are merry, for tomorrow they die.”14 At the end of April 1917, Lewis joined the University Officers’ Training Corp and had a physical examination, whereby details of his height and weight were recorded, and it was noted that he lacked sufficient training to be entered to an Officer Cadet Unit before the end of June, extending his welcome respite. His military duties would include morning parade from 7:00 to 7:45, and an afternoon one from 2:00 to 4:00, with occasional evening lectures on map reading and similar topics. The medical records state Lewis’s height as 5 feet 10 3/4 inches (almost 180 cm) and his weight as 13 stone (about 182 pounds, or 82 kilos). One typical morning for Lewis in the weeks of his “Phoney War” before officer training formally began went as follows: waking at 7 a.m., then reading until 8:30 (William Morris and also Le Chanson de Roland ), before taking first a hot then a cold bath (the habit in College). He had an invitation with the other freshmen to “brekker” (breakfast) with a senior student, Theobald Butler. Butler was a fellow Irishman, and a Sinn Feiner. Fresh on his bookshelves, Lewis noticed, was a volume of poems by Joseph Plunckett, executed after the Easter rising the previous year in Dublin. Lewis liked Butler a great deal, and the conversation turned to Ireland, W. B. Yeats, and then books. After breakfast they decided to bicycle to the river to bathe (Lewis was lent a bike). After a quarter of an hour cycling through quiet Oxford streets they arrived at “Parson’s Pleasure,” an area of riverbank customarily reserved for men, eliminating the need for swimming clothes. Here two branches of the River Cherwell come together, forming in the tract between them “Mesopotamia,” a local name, after the biblical lands between the Tigris and Euphrates. In this quiet period Lewis got to know and was attracted by his second cousin “Cherry” Robbins, daughter of his mother’s cousin, Kittie, who had been posted to a military hospital in Oxford, serving with the Voluntary Aid Detachment.15 Though Cherry was not, in Lewis’s view, “pretty,” he clearly was attracted to her. Most of all, she was a “lover of books,” a high accolade. Cherry and Lewis were able to continue seeing each other during the coming months. Later he wrote of her playing the piano (his favourite instrument at that time) when visiting his college, and of her being plain in a pleasant way. Reading Lewis’s letters of the time one wonders where the relationship might have led had the circumstances been otherwise. Lewis’s in many ways idyllic

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stay at University College ended when he eventually was able to join a cadet battalion on June 7, 1917, as No. 738 Cadet C. S. Lewis, “E” company, Keble College. As the battalion was encamped at Keble College, this allowed Lewis to remain in Oxford for another four months. This meant he could keep in contact with his friends at University College, and with Cherry Robbins. The alphabet dictated that his roommate was fellow Irishman Edward “Paddy” Moore, a trivial-seeming fact that was to dictate much of the shape of his future life. As an “L,” Lewis was placed in a tiny, carpetless room with the “M,” Moore. The two beds in the stark room were in sharp contrast to his comfortable rooms at University College. Paddy was the son of Mrs. Janie Moore, who had left an unhappy marriage and Ireland in 1907 to live in Bristol with Paddy and his young sister. With Paddy’s commission, Mrs. Moore and Maureen moved to Oxford to be near him. She and Lewis first met in June that year, along with others of Paddy’s friends. Immediately attracted to the Moore family, Lewis increasingly was to be found in their company. Maureen, who was eleven at the time, remembered: “Before my brother went out to the trenches in France he asked C. S. Lewis . . . ‘If I don’t come back, would you look after my mother and my little sister?’ ”16 Lewis increasingly became emotionally attached to Paddy’s mother, a feeling heightened by Albert Lewis’s apparent inattention to his son at this time. Mrs. Moore and Maureen were staying in temporary rooms in Wellington Square, not far from Keble College. Paddy was one of a set of six in their section of the College accommodation. In a letter Lewis described them as “public school men and varsity men.”17 A look forward to the future reveals the cost of the war. Lewis was to fight with the infantry, and to be badly wounded north of Arras, France, on April 15, 1918. Paddy Moore was to serve with the 2nd Battallion of the Rifle Brigade, dying at Pargny, France, March 24, 1918. Martin Ashworth Somerville was to battle in Egypt and Palestine with the Rifle Brigade, dying in Palestine, September 24, 1918. Alexander Gordon Sutton was to fight, like Paddy Moore, with the Rifle Brigade, and to be killed on January 2, 1918. Thomas Kerrison Davy, with the 1st Battallion of the Rifle Brigade, was to be severely wounded near Arras on March 29, 1918, dying later. Denis Howard de Pass was to serve with the 12th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, and to be reported “wounded and missing” on April 1, 1918. He was given up as dead, but in fact was captured by the enemy, surviving to fight again in the Second World War. The life of an army cadet was not a natural habitat for Lewis, and he found some consolation, as the weeks of training went on, in meeting up with Cherry Robbins, and also in visiting Mrs. Moore and Maureen with Paddy and others of his set. For Janie Moore, Lewis stood out. She later wrote to

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Albert: “Your boy of course, being Paddy’s room mate, we knew much better than the others, and he was quite the most popular boy of the party; he is very charming and most likeable and won golden opinions from everyone he met here.”18 Another consolation was philosophy. He was reading the Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley. In fact, it was the beginning of a long-standing interest in Berkeley’s form of idealism, because of the philosopher’s spiritual emphasis when it came to understanding our perception of natural things. Though Berkeley argued from a Christian worldview, Lewis was attracted to his denial of the self-sufficient existence of material things. Lewis’s materialism was becoming much more complex than it had been, in his quest for the spiritual and the beautiful. As the war progressed, his view of nature and the material world became darker, and his view of beauty and the spirit more romantic. Lewis was happy at this stage to write to his father about meeting Mrs. Moore, telling him in June that he had met her “once or twice.” He urged “Papy” to visit Oxford for a week. They could, he said, both stay at University College—he was allowed to invite a guest, as a scholar of that college. Soon he was able to visit Albert in Belfast, when granted a brief leave in August. He was careful to make the journey in uniform. Later in August, Warren was able to drop by to see his brother in Oxford en route to France from Belfast after a brief leave. They had an enjoyable afternoon and evening together. By this time Lewis was seeing much more of Paddy’s mother, as the two billet mates visited her together. This was soon to lead to a conflict of interest on Lewis’s part between seeing his father and seeing Mrs. Moore. As the time for active service loomed larger, training became more intense. In September, as part of their officer training, Lewis, Paddy, and the other cadets went to the Wytham Hill area near Oxford to bivouac, and employ model trenches, made more realistic by recent heavy rain. The experience of sleeping out proved to be more pleasant than Lewis anticipated, as there was bracken aplenty to make a soft bed, and the rain kept off. Soon after this taste of actuality Lewis was given a temporary commission as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. Within two months he would be at the front lines in northern France. He began a month’s leave, upsetting Albert by using three weeks of this to stay with Paddy and the Moores at their permanent home in 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. He claimed to Albert that he was unwell with a sore throat, and had to remain to rest, but the real reason was that he preferred Mrs. Moore’s company to his father’s. During this period, Paddy was posted to France with the Rifle Brigade, disappointed that he was not to serve with Lewis in the Somerset regiment. Toward the end of his leave, in mid-October, Lewis finally turned up in Belfast, leaving him only a few days with his father. He was able to confide in Arthur Greeves, who lived close nearby, about his friendship with Paddy’s mother.

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On October 18, he left Little Lea to join his new regiment at Crownhill, near Plymouth, South Devon. Here he became friendly with Laurence Bertrand Johnson, who had been commissioned just a few months before him, and like him had been elected to an Oxford College (in his case, Queens College). He had markedly similar interests to those Lewis shared with his Ulster soulmate, Arthur Greeves, and was to die in France while standing near Lewis from the same shelling that wounded him.19 Johnson seems to have encouraged Lewis to pursue philosophy.20 Lewis told Arthur in a letter that philosophy, particularly metaphysics, was his “great find” at the moment.21 Just under a month after leaving his father at Little Lea, Lewis suddenly was ordered to go to the front after a 48-hour leave. Unable to visit his father in Ireland within that time, Lewis decided to spend it with Mrs. Moore in Bristol, on the way back from Plymouth, desperately telegramming his father to rush to Bristol to see him, where he would have 48-hours leave, and asked him to meet him at the railway station. Albert Lewis simply wired back that he didn’t understand the telegram, and asked him to write. Thus father and son did not meet again before Lewis looked into the doors of hell the following spring. Lewis reported to Southampton harbour at 4 p.m. on November 17, 1917, and crossed to France, to a base camp at Monchy-Le-Preux, a place that later inspired one of his war poems, “French Nocturne.”22 By his nineteenth birthday, November 29, Lewis found himself at the front line and introduced to life in the trenches, where infantrymen prepared to engage the enemy but often encountered a burst of anonymous hot bullets, drifting poison gas, or a fragmenting shell. That same day his brother, elsewhere in France and in a safer location, was promoted to substantive rank of captain. Lewis was astonished to discover that his company’s captain, P. G. K. Harris, was the very same “Pogo” who had taught and dazzled him at Cherbourg School. But “Pogo,” he immediately discovered, had been replaced by a sombre war hero uninterested in his gaudy schoolmaster past. Soldiers usually alternated between the front lines and base camps behind the war front, depending on the ferocity of fighting at a particular time. The front lines were a network of trenches that stretched along a course shaped by the need to repel the enemy advance from anywhere along the borders of Belgium and Germany. The zone of trenches was relatively static; sometimes the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men moved the front line a few miles. In mid-December 1917, Lewis wrote to Albert that he was, at present, billeted in a war-battered town somewhere behind the front line (he was not allowed to reveal his location).23 The town was Arras. Though it bore the scars of three and a half years of war, it would be devastated even more the following March, when the enemy pushed forward in their last major offensive. Lewis and his

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colleagues would have been transported to Arras from the trenches in buses.24 Before Christmas, Lewis was back up in the trenches for a few days, some distance from the main battle lines, his battalion attached to an unnamed company for further training in bombing. By New Year’s Eve, Lewis was still experiencing a relatively normal day in the trenches. As usual, many shells sang over his head to descend on the British gun batteries far behind. This was a “quiet” section of the line, where the dugouts were relatively comfortable and very deep. The wire bunks allowed a comfortable sleep. He felt grateful that he had only been once in a dangerous situation, when a shell fell close by the latrines as he was using them. Thinking back over an eventful year, Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves that his hope was that he had gained the new (meaning Mrs. Moore) without losing the old (that is, Arthur).25 The new year, 1918, at first continued as usual. Lewis’s battalion was still stationed in the reserve lines, and some of the men were helping to rebuild damaged trenches. Albert, using what limited influence he had, had been trying to get Lewis moved to what he thought would be a safer position with the gunners. His son informed him that he had decided to stay with his present company. The same letter played down the discomforts of trench life and its horrors. Troops usually gave an edited version of their experiences to family back home.26 Trench life could not have been as idyllic as the letter to Albert suggested, because by the end of January or beginning of February, Lewis was hospitalized for three weeks at Le Tr´eport, miles away from the front line, with trench fever or, more technically, PUO (pyrexia, unknown origin). Le Tr´eport, he soon discovered, was a small fishing village about 18 miles up the coast from Dieppe. This reminded him sharply of the holiday he and Warren spent with their mother close by in the year before she died, less than 10 years before. It was not until the end of February that Lewis rejoined his battalion at Fampoux, a village to the west of Arras. He was now in the direct line of the final German large-scale attack of the war on the Western Front. Almost immediately he began a four-day tour of the battle front during which he had as many hours sleep. It may have been these days that he remembered in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken up again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gumboots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire.27

When Lewis returned to comparative safety outside the fighting area he spent the whole night digging, in anticipation of the German advance southwards. All hell broke loose a little over two weeks later, on March 21, 1918. In the

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early hours of that morning German General Erich Ludendorff launched an offensive designed to sweep the allied forces off the Western Front—the French from the Aisne and the British from the Somme—and to open the way for the capture of Paris. The initial softening up bombardment lasted five hours. In action were more than 6,000 heavy German guns, supported by another 3,000 mortars. The first of 2 million poison-gas shells fell; that would descend on British lines over the next two weeks. In one of the battles at this time, as German infantry surged forward, a British regiment fought to the last man and the last round. The first day of the new offensive alone, 21,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner.28 A few days into the battle, elsewhere along the front, at Pargny, Paddy Moore was fighting with his 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, resisting the great German offensive. He was last seen the morning of Sunday March 24. His remains were taken up and buried in the field just south of Peronne.29 Mrs. Moore later was told that he died instantly from a bullet to the head as he was receiving emergency treatment for a wound. The truth may well have been more ghastly. Meanwhile Lewis’s battalion was being moved around the battlefront near Arras. Between April 12 and 15, still in the area north of Arras, Lewis was caught up in the Battle of Hazebrouck. The action he saw took place further to the south, around the village of Riez du Vinage. During the battle he took sixty German prisoners. He was wounded on Monday, April 15, by “friendly fire” at Mont Bernenchon, a slightly elevated hamlet just southwest of Riez du Vinage. A British shell burst close by, killing his friends Harry Ayres and Laurence Johnson who were standing with him, and its shards ripping into his body in three places, including his chest. Lewis then started to crawl back toward help and was picked up by a stretcher bearer. A couple of days later Albert in Belfast received a telegram from the War Office; “2nd. Lt. C. S. Lewis Somerset Light Infantry wounded April fifteenth.”30 K. J. Gilchrist may be right in thinking that stanzas in Lewis’s long narrative poem, Dymer (1926), may draw on this experience. . . . Beside a lane In grass he lay. Now first he was aware That, all one side, his body glowed with pain: And the next moment and the next again Was neither less nor more. Without a pause It clung like a great beast with fastened claws; That for a time he could not frame a thought . . .31

Pieces of shrapnel remained in his chest for much of his life. In middle-age, Lewis recalled the trenches, that German onslaught, his wounding and the

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death of Harry Ayres (Laurence Johnson was also remembered with affection elsewhere): Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely “keeping us quiet” by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day. . . . I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.[igh] E.[xplosive], the horribly smashed men still moving like half crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night until they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.32

Everard Wyrall, in his official History of the Somerset Light Infantry, gives an account of the battle that took place between April 14 and 16, in which Lewis was wounded and friends killed: The 13th was a quiet day. Apparently the German advance was, for the time being, at a standstill, his infantry having got well ahead of his artillery so that the latter had to be brought up. His forward guns were only moderately active, but during the evening Mt Bernenchon was shelled and a group of buildings set on fire. Daylight patrols ascertained that the enemy was holding Riez du Vinage, a small wooded village north of the canon [sic] and north-east of Mt Bernenchon. . . . As the leading Somerset men approached the eastern exits of Riez [on April 14], the enemy launched a counter-attack from east of the village and the northern end of the Bois de Pacaut. This counter-attack was at once engaged with Lewis-gun and rifle fire and about 50 per cent of the Germans were shot down. Of the remainder about half ran away and the other half ran towards the Somerset men with their hands in the air crying out ‘Kamerad?’ and were made prisoners. . . . About noon on the 16th the enemy opened a trench-mortar and artillery fire on the line held by the Somerset men. . . . A little later he was observed massing immediately north-east of Riez with the obvious intention of wresting the village from the Somersets. . . . About 2 p.m. the Germans were seen retiring in twos and threes: they had given up the struggle, having found the stout opposition put up by the Somersets impossible to break down. . . . 135 prisoners were taken. . . . The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L. B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C. S. Lewis, A. G. Rawlence, J. R. Hill and C. S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.33

A few days after Albert received the alarming telegram, Warren, stationed at Behucourt near Doullens, heard from him that his brother was wounded and at Etaples (south of Boulogne, on the French coast). He borrowed a

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motorcycle and navigated the 50 miles west through Fr´event, Hesdin, and Montreuil to the coastal hospital. Racked by anxiety, he was able to force himself to concentrate on nursing his engine over rough stretches of road and coaxing it to maximum thrust over straight sections. His fear turned to joy and thankfulness when he found “Jacks” sitting up in bed. Though serious, Warren found, the wounds were not life-threatening, as Albert had thought in his panic. From the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Etaples, a few days later, Lewis was able to write his father that he had been hit in the back of the left hand, on the left leg a little above the knee, and in the left side under the armpit. The Army medical records give more detail: The Board find he was struck by shell fragments which caused 3 wounds. 1st, left chest post-axillary region, this was followed by haemoptysis and epistaxis and complicated with a fracture of the left 4th rib. 2nd wound: left wrist quite superficial. 3rd wound: left leg just above the popliteal space. Present condition: wounds have healed and good entry of air into the lung, but the left upper lobe behind is dull. Foreign body still present in chest, removal not contemplated—there is no danger to nerve or bone in other wounds.34

In the mobile hospital in Etaples, Lewis worked at understanding his horrific experience in the light of his atheistic beliefs, which, as his poetry written at that time reveals, had a gnostic cast, as he sought to retain a place for beauty and the spirit.35 He thought about the “lusts of the flesh” that so often buffeted him. He had found himself to become almost monastic about them. This is because, he reasoned, fleshly desires increased the mastery of matter over the human spirit. On the battlefield, and in hospital among the casualties of war, he saw spirit constantly evading matter: evading bullets, artillery shells, and driven by the sheer animal fears and pains that wrack human beings. He saw the equation starkly now as—Matter equals Nature, equals Satan. The only nonnatural, nonmaterial thing that he discovered was Beauty. Beauty was the only spiritual thing he could find. Nature was a prison house from which only man was capable of escape, through the spiritual side of him. There was, however, no God to aid him. It was a materialistic mysticism, owing much to Lewis’s reading of Schopenhauer.36 A poem from Lewis’s volume of mainly war poetry composed in the war years, Spirits in Bondage, vividly portrays his beliefs at this time: Satan Speaks I am Nature, the Mighty Mother, I am the law: ye have none other.

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I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh, I am the lust in your itching flesh. I am the battle’s filth and strain, I am the widow’s empty pain. I am the sea to smother your breath, I am the bomb, the falling death. I am the fact and the crushing reason To thwart your fantasy’s new-born treason. I am the spider making her net, I am the beast with jaws blood-wet. I am a wolf that follows the sun And I will catch him ere day be done. C. S. Lewis (writing as Clive Hamilton)37

Lewis was transported later in May 1918 to the Endsleigh Palace Hospital, in central London, arriving on a stretcher. He worked out that he had been brought in this way because he had no uniform (his was cut off him when treated for his wounds). He was pleased to find this a comfortable place, where he even had a separate room. He was also happily aware of the fact that he could easily order from the many bookshops nearby. By the next month he was able to attend Drury Lane theatre one evening to hear Wagner’s The Valkyrie, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. One Sunday he took the train to Bookham, to visit the Kirkpatricks. As the days drew on Lewis missed his family. He wrote many pleas to Albert to visit him. “Come and see me. I am homesick, that is the long and short of it.”38 Warren commented years later, after his brother’s death: “One would have thought that it would have been impossible to resist such an appeal as this. But my father was a very peculiar man in some respects; in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Lewis remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs Moore for the affection which was apparently denied him at home.”39 Unlike Albert, Janie Moore was a frequent visitor to London. She transferred to Lewis the attention she had paid to Paddy when he was alive, even eventually to the extent of moving to be near Lewis as he was moved from camp to camp by the army when he was discharged from hospital. Lewis arranged to convalesce in Bristol, to be near Mrs. Moore and Maureen, being moved there near the end of June. His recovery was slower

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than anticipated—he remained in Bristol until mid-October, ruling out a return to the front. While in Bristol, Lewis was able to report some good news to his Ulster friend Arthur Greeves. After keeping his slim MS of poetry for what seemed a considerable time William Heinemann had accepted it for publication. He told Arthur that it would be called “Spirits in Prison,” and that it was weaved around his belief that nature is a prison house and satanic. The spiritual opposes “the cosmic arrangement.” The volume of what effectively is war poetry was eventually published under the revised title of Spirits in Bondage in March, 1919, when Lewis was twenty. In the early hours of November 11, 1918, Warren Lewis in France recorded in his diary the celebrations in certain anticipation of the war’s end: I was in the office at about 9 p.m., and suddenly there was an outburst of sirens, rockets, Verey lights, hooters, searchlights and all sorts of things. Hurried back to the mess and found everyone dancing round the room! Everyone off their heads. Cars with people sitting all over them. Australians firing Verey pistols in the square. There were six bonfires going with Belgians dancing and shouting round them with our lads. Cathedral and Church bells pealed most of the night. Got home and to bed about 2.30 a.m. . . . A very great day indeed. So ends the war.40

Later that day, at 11 a.m., after four and a quarter years of war in which 10 million died, an armistice was formally signed in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiegne. Guns fell silent across the war fields of Europe. But uppermost in Warren’s mind that day was the fact that his beloved brother had come through the war safely; the nightmare of losing him had vanished. Two days before Christmas, 1918, Warren arrived home in Little Lea from the Belfast ferry, having come to his father on leave. He believed that he would not see his brother, who was not yet on leave, but still at camp. But late on December 27 he recorded in his diary: A red letter day. We were sitting in the study about eleven o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jacks! He has been demobilized thank God. Needless to say there were great doings. He is looking pretty fit. We had lunch and then all three went for a walk. It was as if the evil dream of 4 years had passed away and we were still in the year 1915. In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honour of the event. The first time I have ever had champagne at home. Had the usual long conversation with Jacks after going to bed.41

Post-bellum: The Permanent Influence of War In a letter written on May 8, 1939, Lewis observed: “My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years.”42 War became for him an image of a permanent cosmic war between good and evil. In a sermon preached

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early in the Second World War, “Learning in wartime,” he commented: “War creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.”43 During the First World War years and immediately after it, he conceived the struggle in terms of a battle between nature and spirit, with nature being evil unless touched by beauty and spirit. After Lewis’s conversion to theism in 1929 and to Christian belief in 1931, in stark constrast, he accepted an orthodox Christian view of the essential goodness of nature, in which evil is a despoiling and privation of good. Furthermore evil affected both nature and spirit, with the origin of evil lying in the spirit’s freedom to rebel against God, rather than in nature. Lewis’s war experience effectively became internalised firstly as a materialistic vision of the war of nature and spirit, and then of a cosmic battle between good and evil in Judeo-Christian theistic terms. Lewis therefore never indulged in the fashionable literary spirit of disillusionment after World War One. There was not a fundamental cognitive dissonance between his beliefs and the horrors of his wartime experience.44 It is not surprising therefore that perpetual cosmic war features prominently in Lewis’s writings. This is particularly true of his first theological fantasy, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933). Significantly John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War influenced the writing of this book. These allegories reflect a similar belief in the great battle for a person’s soul. Instead of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the central figure in The Pilgrim’s Regress is John, loosely based on Lewis himself. Like in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the quest can be mapped. Indeed, Lewis, very significantly, provides his reader with a Mappa Mundi, a term used for the great medieval European maps of the world, in which the human soul is divided into north and south, the north representing arid intellectualism and the south emotional excess. A straight road passes between them. The story powerfully illuminates the intellectual climate of the 1920s and early 1930s, and its geography of thought applies much more widely. In his preface to the third edition to this allegorical autobiography, Lewis explained the map as a scheme of a Holy War as he saw it. It depicts, he said, hell’s dual attack on the mind and the physical sensations associated with war. Theologian J. I. Packer has identified the world depicted in Lewis’s Mappa Mundi with the idea of the Holy War found in Bunyan and other Puritan writers, sifted as well through Lewis’s war experience; this conflict not only informs The Pilgrim’s Regress, but, Packer argues, really provides a context for understanding Lewis’s canon as a whole.45 The attack on the soul from north and south represent, in Lewis’s words “equal and opposite evils, each continually strengthened and made plausible by its critique of the other.” The Northern people are cold, with “rigid systems whether sceptical or

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dogmatic, Aristocrats, Stoics, Pharisees, Rigorists, signed and sealed members of highly organized ‘Parties.’ “The emotional Southerners are the opposite, “boneless souls whose doors stand open day and night to almost every visitant, but always with the readiest welcome for those . . . who offer some sort of intoxication. . . . Every feeling is justified by the mere fact that it is felt: for a Northerner, every feeling on the same ground is suspect.”46 Both tendencies actually dehumanize us, a thesis he explored in The Abolition of Man (1943). To remain human we have no choice but the straight and narrow, the “Main Road”; again, as Lewis suggests in his preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress: “With both the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ a man has, I take it, only one concern—to avoid them and hold the Main Road. . . . We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men—things at once rational, and animal.”47 On the Mappa Mundi provided by Lewis in The Pilgrim’s Regress it is significant that there are military railways both to the north and south. He observes in his preface to the third edition that “the two military railways were meant to symbolize the double attack from Hell on the two sides of our nature. It was hoped that the roads spreading out from each of the enemy railheads would look like claws or tentacles reaching out into the country of Man’s Soul.”48 The Mappa Mundi reappears transformed on a child’s scale in the geography and events of The Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia is a lush valley country, extending from the Lantern Waste in the west to Cair Paravel on the shores of the Great Eastern Sea. It is a pastoral, green world full of trackless woods inhabited by talking animals and dumb beasts. The chief of its creatures is also its creator, Aslan, a talking lion. To the north and south are territories associated with danger—the White Witch dwells in the cold north for hundreds of years, and terrifying giants live there, while far south the hot lands of Calormen (calor = hot) represent a constant threat to Narnian security. Narnia, in fact, is a middle-world in which the qualities of ordinary life and freedom are nourished. For Aravis, fleeing in despair with Shasta (Prince Cor) from Calorman, Narnia represents hope.49 Narnia’s middle-world between dangers to north and south echoes the Mappa Mundi. Relevant to Lewis’s perennial theme of cosmic war is a phenomenon pointed out by Professor T. A. Shippey. He showed links between several apparently disparate writers just after the Second World War. The writers were linked in struggling with the appalling reality of evil in the modern world, a theme that forced them to create new forms and abandon the received canons of what constitutes a proper novel and fiction. The writers and their books, as highlighted by Shippey, are William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954), Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945, the final part of his science-fiction trilogy), George Orwell’s Animal

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Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (published 1958 but written long before).50 That Hideous Strength is, in fact, the close fictional counterpart to his philosophical essay, The Abolition of Man, based upon the schema of cosmic war and the battle for the human soul. This notion integrated the personal and the philosophical for C. S. Lewis: It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting people you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. . . . It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.51

NOTES 1. John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (London: HarperCollins), 8. 2. Ibid., 9. 3. David Lloyd George, “5 January, 1918: Prime Minister Lloyd George on the British War Aims.” http://www.lib.byu.edu/∼rdh/wwi/1918/waraims.html (accessed July 30, 2006). 4. William T. Kirkpatrick (1848–1921) was Lewis’s tutor from 1914–1917 and nicknamed by him “the Great Knock” because of the impact of his stringent logical mind on the teenager. Kirkpatrick was then retired as headmaster of Lurgan College, in the north of Ireland, which Albert had attended. He lived in “Gastons,” Bookham, Surrey, England, where Lewis lodged happily during the tutorage. Lewis held a great affection for Kirkpatrick, describing him as the person who came closer to being “a purely logical entity” than anyone else he had ever met. Kirkpatrick’s method was to combine language study with firsthand experience of major works; he guided Lewis in German, French, Italian, Latin, and Classical Greek. His rationalism and atheism reinforced Lewis’s own beliefs at that time. Kirkpatrick made his mark on Lewis’s fiction, to be seen in some characteristics of the learned Professor Digory Kirke in the Narnian Chronicles and in the sceptical Ulsterman Andrew MacPhee in That Hideous Strength. 5. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 1 (London: HarperCollins), 72. 6. Ibid., 83. 7. Arthur Greeves was a friend of Lewis’s from teenage years who shared a similar taste in reading and all things “northern,” such as Old Norse mythology. Arthur’s skill was in visual art rather than words, though he was an appreciative reader of

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what was to be an extensive life-long correspondence from Lewis. Arthur lived at a house called “Bernagh,” nearly opposite Lewis in Belfast. Lewis continued to meet up with Arthur until his death. Between 1921 and 1923, Arthur Greeves studied at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. Later he exhibited with the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. Lewis did not share his faith (Arthur came from a Christian Brethren background) until 1931, and later Arthur explored varieties of faith, concluding his life as a Quaker. 8. Ibid., 102. 9. Ibid., 111–112. 10. See http://collections.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.1271 (accessed July 30, 2006). 11. See for example Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves, July 4, 1916 (Collected Letters, Volume 1, 205). 12. Unpublished Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930, 5:174. The Lewis Papers, ed. W. H. Lewis,can be consulted at The Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL, and The Bodleian Library, Oxford. 13. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 266. 14. Ibid., 299. 15. Voluntary Aid Detachments were formed in 1909 to give medical help in time of war. When the First World War began there were more than 2,500 VADs in Britain. In 1914, two-thirds of the 74,000 VADs were women and girls. A famous VAD was Vera Brittain, author of A Testament of Youth. 16. Wade Center Oral History interview with Maureen Moore (Maureen Blake), 1984. 17. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 317. 18. Letter to Albert Lewis from Mrs. Janie Moore in October 1917, Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 5, 239. 19. K. J. Gilchrist, A Morning after War (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 125. 20. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 341. Lewis warmly reminisces about Johnson in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Bles, 1955), Chapter XII. 21. Ibid., 342. 22. See his poem “French Nocturne” in Spirits in Bondage (1919). Available online in the public domain, e.g., from Project Gutenburg. 23. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 348. 24. Gilchrist, A Morning after War, 76. 25. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 349. 26. Gilchrist discusses this sanitizing of the horrors in his A Morning after War. For instance, casualties were often described as dying instantly from a head wound, whereas the reality was often very different. 27. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XII. 28. Martin Gilbert, First World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 406–407.

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29. Second Lieutenant E. F. C. Moore’s death would not be confirmed officially until September. In December 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry and initiative.” 30. Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 5, 308. 31. C. S. Lewis, Dymer, Canto VIII, 1, 2, collected in C. S. Lewis, Narrative Poems (London: Bles, 1969). 32. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XII. 33. Quoted in Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 43. Sergeant Ayres belonged to the “other ranks.” 34. Ibid., 44. 35. For an analysis of his thought and its development at this period, see David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert (Downers Grove, IL: IVP), 2002. 36. For more on the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, see Downing, 92–93. 37. C. S. Lewis, “Satan Speaks,” in Spirits in Bondage (1919), http://www .anglicanlibrary.org/lewis/spirits/(accessed July 30, 2006). 38. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 386. 39. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” in W. H. Lewis (ed.), Letters of C. S. Lewis (London: Bles), 1966, 9–10. 40. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, ed. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), 3–4. 41. Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 6, 79. 42. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume 2 (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 258. 43. C. S. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime,” in Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces (HarperCollins, 2000), 580. 44. This is the opposite of what is argued in K. J. Gilchrist’s A Morning after War: C. S. Lewis and WWI, who believes that Lewis suppressed the reality of his wartime experience, because it devastated his romantic beliefs that integrated his life. In Dymer, however, Gilchrist argues, he was able to face the end of romantic ideals. Gilchrist is completely right, however, I think, in concluding: “The things Lewis met in France and the fragments—metal or metaphorical—that he carried within him from that place gave him a knowledge of grief, of loss, of the atrocities that humankind is capable of producing, of relationships awry and relationships lost, of the wanderings of youth—knowledge that after his conversion continued to inform his views of life, the cosmos, and his faith beyond a point where many people can follow” (Gilchrist, 218). 45. J. I. Packer, “Living Truth for a Dying World: The Message of C.S. Lewis,” in The J. I. Packer Collection, ed. Alister McGrath, (Leicester: IVP, 1999). 46. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 11– 12. 47. Ibid., 13. 48. Ibid., 14. 49. The story of Aravis and Shasta is told in Lewis’s Narnian Chronicle, The Horse and His Boy (1954).

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50. T. A. Shippey, “Tolkien as a Post-War Writer,” in Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon, ed. K. J. Battarbee (Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 1993). 51. “The Weight of Glory,” in C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces (HarperCollins, 2000), 105–106.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anonymous. Military Service Act, 1916. http://collections.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ ConWebDoc.1271 (accessed July 30, 2006). Battarbee, K. J. Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon. Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 1993. Downing, David C. The Most Reluctant Convert. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002. Duriez, Colin. The C. S. Lewis Chronicles: The Indispensable Biography of the Creator of Narnia Full of Little-Known Facts, Events and Miscellany. New York: Bluebridge, 2005. ———. The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia, by Crossway Books, 2000/SPCK, June 2002. ———. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. New York: The Paulist Press & Thrupp, 2003. Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War. London: HarperCollins, 2003. George, David Lloyd. “5 January, 1918: Prime Minister Lloyd George on the British War Aims,” http://www.lib.byu.edu/∼rdh/wwi/1918/waraims.html (accessed July 30, 2006). Gilbert, Martin. First World War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994. Gilchrist, K. J. A Morning after War: C. S. Lewis and WWI. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. London: HarperCollins, 3rd ed., 2002. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Kilby, Clyde S. and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982. Lewis, C. S. Collected Letters, Volume 1. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. Narrative Poems. London: Bles, 1969. ———. The Pilgrim’s Regress. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958. ———. Spirits in Bondage (1919). http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/lewis/spirits/ (accessed July 30, 2006). ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: Bles, 1955. Lewis, W. H., ed. Letters of C. S. Lewis. London: Bles, 1966.

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———. Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930. n. d. (can be consulted at The Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL, and The Bodleian Library, Oxford.) McGrath, Alister, ed., The J. I. Packer Collection. Leicester: IVP, 1999. Shippey, T. A. “Tolkien as a Post-War Writer.” In Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon. Edited by K. J. Battarbee. Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 1993.

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Lewis the Reluctant Convert: Surprised by Faith Perry C. Bramlett

The conversion journey of C. S. Lewis covered a little over 18 years, from 1912 to 1931. During this time he lost his childhood belief in God, became an arrogant atheist, regained his belief in God, and then became a believer in and follower of Christ. The best source we have to learn about the trajectory of his journey to committed Christian faith is his exercise in autobiographical reflection, Surprised by Joy, published about 25 years after his conversion. As its title aptly expresses, Lewis regarded his conversion as an unexpected gift. Other sources we have include Lewis’s letters to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, his diary chronicling his early days as a professor at Oxford University, testimonies of some who knew him, and biographical works and studies. The following essay is a chronological look and overview of a remarkable, interesting, and complex life and conversion, a faith journey that really did not end. GOD’S SIGNPOST TO CONVERSION: JOY From the time he was a little boy, C. S. Lewis frequently had certain romantic longings, an intense desire, a wanting of something, something he could not describe. He called this longing sehnsucht (originally German; used as English since 1847), or “Joy,” and it recurred throughout his adolescence until it led him in his early adulthood to the grand culmination of belief in God (1929), and a few years later (late 1931), to commitment to Jesus Christ.

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For Lewis, Joy was something he wanted permanently, and he wanted it more than anything else. Joy was a forerunner and signpost to conversion, and in searching for it Lewis, as he discovered later, was reaching out to unite with the transcendent God. He followed a hard road to reach belief and conversion; the “checkmate” as he called it was in doubt for a long while as the world, his own flesh, and the devil unleashed their wiles upon him. His first experiences of Joy were found in seemingly ordinary incidents when he was a young boy. He gave several examples of these in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, the first when he and his brother Warren encountered the beauty of nature: “Every day there were what we called ‘the Green Hills’; that is, the low line of the Castlereigh Hills that we saw from the nursery windows. They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unobtainable. They taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.”1 Other examples of the experience of Joy included being overwhelmed by the beauty of a flowering currant bush in his family’s garden; a memory of his brother’s toy garden; “the idea of autumn” in Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin; and reading a Norse myth in a poem translated by Longfellow. For Lewis, his experiences of Joy were not just nostalgia or a child’s playful imagination. He felt so strongly about these experiences of Joy that in Surprised by Joy he wrote that the central story of his life was about nothing else. After he became a Christian, Lewis realized that these intense longings were actually a desire for God and his “far-off country,” or heaven. He wrote that for many, the experience of Joy could be misinterpreted. Some could dismiss it as “romantic” or “wishful thinking” fancies, or substitute earthly pleasures for Joy, which would leave them ultimately unsatisfied, or some could even make Joy into an idol, something to be adored in itself, without seeking its source. In his great sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis warned that experiences of Joy “are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols . . . for they are not the thing itself, they are only . . . news from a country we have not visited.”2 For Lewis, Joy was “the serious business of heaven,” but he realized that some people might object to the idea of God’s placing a desire for himself in his created human beings, similar to holding a carrot in front of a donkey. In a 1946 essay, Lewis suggested that a wise donkey would look back on his life and be grateful for the carrot, for otherwise he “might still have thought eating was the greatest happiness.”3 And he understood that our desire for heaven cannot be totally satisfied in this life; the God-placed desire is evidence that somewhere in the universe there is something that will finally satisfy it. Before Lewis’s conversion, Joy was central to his existence and was at times, almost an obsession. After he became a Christian, he still experienced Joy

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(‘the old stab”) as often as before. But he wrote that he had lost nearly all interest in the subject, and that its experiences had never had the kind of importance that he once had given it: “It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While the other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter.”4 WHAT LEWIS’S CONVERSION WAS NOT Any discussion of the conversion of C. S. Lewis should mention what it was not. Lewis did not, as is common in some circles to say today, have a single experience when he “accepted Jesus into his life.” He did not “walk down an aisle” at a church, take a minister’s hand, and make a “profession of faith.” Lewis’s conversion, at least at the beginning of his life of faith, did not focus on the church, either on its teachings, sacraments, or community life. Indeed, one his friends at Cambridge, Richard Ladborough, commented that although Lewis was very orthodox and disciplined in his approach to his personal faith (particularly his prayers), he showed little interest in organized religion and had “little sense of the Church.”5 Lewis was not anti-Church, but, contrary to how many see it today, he saw his conversion primarily as not leading to an institution but rather as a refugee from a largely unbelieving culture.6 Also, Lewis’s conversion was not based primarily on a desire for heaven or a fear of and desire to “escape” from hell; in fact, when he first became a Christian he did not believe in an afterlife. He did believe that the desire and fear of and for the eternal was a selfish reaction, a reflection of a person’s avoidance of the real world and the problems therein. In Reflections on the Psalms he wrote that “happiness or misery beyond death . . . are not even religious subjects at all.”7 And he cautioned that “until a certain spiritual level is reached, the promise of immortality will always operate as a bribe which vitiates the whole religion . . .”8 In Mere Christianity he reiterated this when he commented that when people trust God for salvation they should not hope to get heaven as a reward for their actions, but rather because they want to act in a certain way “because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”9 Lewis’s conversion, at least as belief in God, was not directly influenced by his reading of the Bible or recognizing its authority, as it had in the lives of famous Christian converts like Augustine and John Calvin. There is no evidence, for example, that Lewis was ever “convicted” to repentance by reading the Bible, nor was he apparently compelled to read it during the long road of his conversion journey. There is, in fact, an interesting entry in his diary (October 18, 1922), in which he said that “one got very little definite teaching in the Gospels; the writers had apparently seen something

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overwhelming, but been unable to reproduce it.”10 By the late 1920s he was not sure if the Gospel writers had seen anything, and he saw the incarnation as a myth created by popular imagination. However, although he loved the literary aspects of the scriptures, Lewis did not approach the Bible as if it were only literature. In Reflections on the Psalms he wrote that the Bible “carried” the Word of God, and that the Christian should learn its overall message, which started with Jesus Christ. THE THREADS OF A CONVERSION In 1946, Lewis received a letter from a man in New Jersey who asked him details about his conversion.11 It is useful to employ this as an overall guide to the spiritual journey Lewis had undertook in his youth, adolescence, and to adulthood. Lewis replied to his correspondent that he had been baptized in the Church of Ireland, and that his parents went regularly to church but were not particularly pious. He noted that his faith was undermined first by modern school editions of classical texts, in which the academic notes always assumed that the pagan religions were in error. Lewis then reasoned, “why shouldn’t ours be equally false?” He then mentions in passing, without much annotation, certain teachers who helped challenge his early beliefs. One was W. T. Kirkpatrick, the famous “Great Knock” who had prepped him for Oxford entrance exams. He continues, referring to 15 years of hypocrisy and agnosticism, in which he flirted with pantheism and “various other sub-Christian beliefs.” Lewis then credits his return to belief (at the age of twenty-nine) to the route of philosophy, particularly the writings of George Berkeley; medieval literature (“it became harder and harder to think that all those great poets & philosophers were wrong”); by the “strong influence” of George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton; and by “argument with an Anthroposophist,” the “Great War” of ideas he had with his friend (and later lawyer) Owen Barfield. Lewis’s response forms, in effect, an early outline of the story he will tell in more detail in Surprised by Joy. It is therefore helpful to pick up the thread of this story in his earliest, idyllic days at home in Belfast. Lewis was raised in a family that worshiped every Sunday, at St. Mark’s, Dundela in east Belfast. He was baptized at St. Mark’s in January 1899, and confirmed there in December 1914. He wrote in Surprised by Joy that he “was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannot remember feeling much interest in it.”12 The death of his mother Flora in August of 1908 was, according to some (but not Lewis), his first religious experience. Whatever it was, it was an event that disturbed him deeply. He had been taught by his

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parents that prayers offered in faith would be granted, yet when he prayed for his mother’s recovery nevertheless she died. Lewis wrote that he saw God then as a kind of magician, a power who would heed and heal, then go away. With his mother’s death “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable,” disappeared from the young Lewis’s life. Although the apparent desertion of the “magician” God troubled him, Lewis found ways to explore the Christian faith while at Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, northwest of London. He enrolled at the prep school (which he called “Belsen” in Surprised by Joy), in September of 1908, and stayed there nearly two years. At Wynyard he became an “effective believer” and attended worship services at the Anglo-Catholic St. John’s Church. Although his first impressions of the church were unfavorable, and he disliked the candles, incense, and vestments, St. John’s did have a positive impact on his intellect. As his friend and biographer George Sayer commented, Lewis “heard in sermons not ‘general uplift’ but the essential doctrines of Christianity taught by men who really believed in them.”13 He started reading the Bible and praying regularly, and had profitable and interesting metaphysical discussions about religion with other students. Lewis left Wynyard in July, 1910, to spend half a term a mile from his home at Campbell College, a school that was comparable to an English public school. His most important intellectual discovery there was being introduced to Matthew Arnold’s narrative poem Sohrab and Rustum. Sohrab is the most Homeric of all English poems, and Lewis loved it his whole life. His enjoyment of the poem led him to the Iliad, and after that Lewis enjoyed almost all heroic poetry and stories. His father withdrew him because of a bad cough and “poor chest,” and in January, 1911, he was sent to Cherbourg, a prep school in Malvern, which he called “Chartres” in Surprised by Joy. His brother Warren was at Malvern College, just a few minutes away. The religion Lewis gained at Wynyard did not take hold, and by the time he finished at Cherbourg, his faith had gone away. This change was triggered in part by a Miss G. E. Cowie, a kindly matron at the school who was fascinated with occult studies, Rosicrucianism, and spiritualism. In effect she became Lewis’s surrogate mother, and showered him with attention and affection. She was dismissed from the school for two reasons: for her physical relationship with Lewis, and because she took his side when he complained to the headmaster about censorship of his letters home.14 There was no deliberate attempt by her to destroy Lewis’s faith; her singular manner of religious and spiritualistic questing seemed so exciting that Lewis’s conventional religion, by contrast, seemed dull and unattractive. Lewis said that “unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges of my belief . . . the speculative character of all this occultism began to spread—yes, and to

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spread deliciously—to the stern truths of the creed . . . I was soon altering ‘I believe’ to ‘one does feel.’ ”15 At Cherbourg, Lewis’s early reading stayed in his imagination and pointed him toward atheism. He considered Lucretius’s argument in De Rerum Natura16 to be a strong argument for atheism: “Had God designed the world, it would not be so frail and faulty as we see.”17 His earlier reading of the short stories of H. G. Wells and the popular cosmology works of Sir Robert Ball further solidified his ideas about the frailty and insignificance of human beings and the vastness and incomprehensibility of the universe.18 Adolescence was the time when Lewis felt the full force of worldly temptations. He met a young teacher at the school named “Pogo,” who introduced the boys to vulgarity and worldly wisdom through off-color jokes and his questionable lifestyle in town. Lewis said later that after meeting and falling under the influence of Pogo, he lost many of his good, childlike qualities and began to try very hard to make himself into a snob. Along with this, Lewis suffered from adolescent sexual fantasies, temptations, and acting out behavior, including masturbation. In those days, ministers and teachers condemned virtually any type of sexual “problem” as a sin against the Holy Spirit; some doctors said it could lead to madness. This caused Lewis a great amount of guilt, as he confessed his sins and prayed over and over again for healing and forgiveness. His prayers were not answered, and he soon began to lose what faith he had. Prayer became virtually impossible for him because he questioned his motives and whether or not he was really concentrating on what he was saying. This led to many a tortuous night with no peace, no joy, in the practice of his religion. It became a fruitless, guilt-ridden exercise. At this time Lewis was exposed to non-Christian religions, and this also caused him to question the validity of Christian doctrines and ideals. His reading, particularly in Virgil, presented him with a “mass of religious ideas” that were similar to those of orthodox Christianity. The overall impression he received from his reading, and from teachers, was that all religion in general was false, a kind of nonsense that humanity always seemed to blunder into. What bothered him the most was that many Christian authors assumed that although the pagan themes and stories were similar to those of Christianity, they could be safely dismissed as nonsensical and illusory. Lewis wrote: “The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true . . . But on what grounds could I believe in this exception?”19 Lewis concluded that Christianity was no different than many other religions. Almost simultaneously with the loss of his faith Lewis discovered the music of Wagner through a gramophone catalogue that advertised Siegfried and

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the Twilight of the Gods. He soon became fascinated with Celtic and Norse mythology, which liberated and informed his imagination, and his search for “northernness” revived his younger longings and the desire for Joy. The excitement and mystery Lewis found in music and mythological stories had a range of depth that he felt was lacking in many religions, including Christianity. Wagner became more important to Lewis than anything, including his school work. It was a new religion for Lewis; it was just more important than religion. He said this music contained things that religion should contain but did not. In Surprised by Joy (published in 1956) he made a very interesting and telling statement about his love for northernness and mythology, in that he came closer to true adoration (or worship) for the Norse gods “whom I disbelieved in than I had ever done about the true God while I believed . . . I can almost think that I was sent back to false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship . . . when the true God should recall me to Himself.”20 Considering these words and other evidence, Lewis’s conversion was one from belief in God and in basic Christian doctrine, to unbelief, to belief again in God, then commitment to Christ. When Lewis completed his work at Cherbourg School in July 1913, he was offered a scholarship to study classics at Malvern College. He entered the college in September 1913, but stayed less than one year. Although Lewis grew to hate “Wyvern” (as he calls it in Surprised by Joy), he loved the library and did well in his school work, particularly with a translation of Horace. His reading of Norse poetry inspired him to write Loki Bound, an operatic tragedy (never published) based on Norse mythology but written in Greek form. Loki Bound was extremely pessimistic and a projection of Lewis’s mindset at the time, and he said that like other atheists his life was a contradiction: “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”21 A LASTING FRIENDSHIP: ARTHUR GREEVES During the Easter vacation of 1914, Lewis made acquaintances with a young man named Arthur Greeves, who was three years older and lived across the street from Lewis’s family home in Belfast—Little Lea. Arthur had been ill, and a message had been sent to say that he would welcome a visit from Lewis. This visit started a lifelong friendship, and Arthur was Lewis’s first Christian friend. The two boys discovered that they had similar tastes in literature, mythology, and northernness. By June of that year they started a correspondence, the longest of Lewis’s life to one person. Many of Lewis’s letters to Greeves were published in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963).

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Through the years Lewis and Greeves shared virtually everything, from comments about the books they were reading, to their secret adolescent sexual fantasies and acting out to difficulties with their families and friends. Greeves criticized Lewis’s first openly Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, for his friend’s overuse of quotations and muddy rhetoric, and years later Lewis asked Greeves to proofread what many believe to be his finest work of fiction, Till We Have Faces. Although Lewis shared with Arthur his views, questions, doubts, and progress toward theism and committed Christianity, they did have differences. As late as the 1940s, Greeves disagreed with Lewis’s view of the divinity of Christ, and evidently had issues with Lewis’s view of the providence of God.22 Although raised as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, during his life Greeves investigated several religions and varieties of faith practice, including the Baha’i faith and Unitarianism. At the end of his life he became a Quaker, the faith of his father’s ancestors. Lewis commented that in the early years of their friendship, Arthur was always a Christian and he was always an atheist. From Greeves, Lewis learned charity and kindness, and it always pained Greeves when the “arrogant atheist” Lewis would rail and attack Christians and their faith. But Greeves was always patient with Lewis, and it is significant that when Lewis passed on from merely believing in God to definitely believing in and deciding to follow Christ, Arthur Greeves was the first person he notified.23 LEWIS AND “THE GREAT KNOCK” After Malvern, Lewis’s father Albert decided to send him to private study with an old family friend, William T. Kirkpatrick (1848–1921), whom he trusted to get Lewis ready for entrance examinations at Oxford.24 Lewis was to spend the next two years of his life with the “Great Knock,” as the family called him, and these years were to be some of the most eventful of his whole life. Lewis began his studies with Kirkpatrick in September 1914 and quickly learned the importance of insisting on the question of truth. Kirkpatrick was an atheist, had been a lay Presbyterian preacher, and was a rationalist. He was well over six feet tall, shabbily dressed, and looked like a gardener. Lewis called him a “logical entity” who would dispute the logical merits of even the most off-hand remark. Any tendency toward triteness or unexplained assumptions were immediately corrected, and Kirkpatrick never wavered in his conviction that language was solely for communicating or discovering truth. He demanded hard discipline from his students, and Lewis adhered to a rigid schedule. He arrived at the Kirkpatrick home on a Saturday and on Monday

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began reading Homer in the original Greek. Lewis made steady progress in Greek, and soon started reading original works in Latin, German, and Italian; in the evenings Mrs. Kirkpatrick would tutor Lewis in French and soon he was reading French novels. Later on he read and studied Demosthenes, Cicero, Lucretius, Catullus, Tacitus, Herodotus, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus in the original languages. He gave Kirkpatrick regular compositions in Greek and Latin, and after a while, learned to think in Greek. He was 16 years old. Kirkpatrick had Lewis read religious critics such as Arthur Schopenhauer, and Lewis mentioned that “he was great” on James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. From Schopenhauer’s works, particularly his magnum opus The World as Will and Idea, Lewis’s idea about the randomness of the universe was reinforced. From The Golden Bough (originally twelve volumes, 1890–1915), Lewis, as David Downing pointed out, “came to feel that religion was simply an expression of culture . . . that no one system of beliefs, such as Christianity, was any more ‘true’ than any other.”25 The current opinion of Frazer and other anthropologists of Lewis’s time was that Christianity was virtually the same as all primitive religions and was not unique. Christianity’s story about a dying and resurrecting God was one that had been echoed in many other religions. Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves and told him that “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention . . .”26 It should be added that Kirkpatrick did not so much as reinforce Lewis’s atheism as he “added ammunition” to a position Lewis already had. Lewis also wrote that the “fresh ammunition” was received indirectly from Kirkpatrick’s tone and from the books he recommended. Kirkpatrick never directly attacked religion in Lewis’s presence.27 The nearly two and a half years that Lewis spent under the tutelage of Kirkpatrick were difficult but pleasant. In later years he looked back on them and on Kirkpatrick with appreciation and even reverence. OXFORD DAYS When Kirkpatrick thought he was ready, it was arranged for Lewis to sit for an examination for a scholarship at Oxford. On December 4, 1916, Lewis arrived in Oxford for the first time, and took his scholarship examinations on December 5–9. Less than a week later he was notified that although New College, his first choice, had passed him over, he had been accepted at University College. He had been awarded the second of their three available scholarships for the study of classics. By a very odd coincidence, the other two scholarships were awarded to Cecil Harwood at Christ Church and Owen

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Barfield at Wadham, who were to be his closest friends at Oxford and for years beyond. He was not yet a member of the University, as he had to pass the entrance examinations, called responsions. On March 20–21, he came back to Oxford, but failed to pass the mathematics (particularly algebra) requirement of the examination for general admission to the university. He failed the examination again when he took it in June, and never did pass algebra. Fortunately for Lewis, however, the University was making some exceptions because it was wartime. The University passed a benevolent decree that exempted ex-servicemen from taking the examination. Lewis became a member of the University of Oxford and almost immediately entered the University Officers’ Training Corps. George Sayer wrote that the notebook entry of April 28 read: “Matriculated. College Library. Entered name in Coll. books.”28 Lewis’s cadet battalion was sequestered at Keble College, so he did not have to leave the university for training. In a few weeks he completed his training, was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, and sent directly to the front. He arrived at the front lines in France on his nineteenth birthday, November 1917. In January 1918 Lewis was hospitalized at the No. 10 Red Cross Hospital at Le Treport, suffering from trench fever. None of his wartime experiences shook his atheism. During his time in hospital, he wrote these sarcastic words to Arthur Greeves: “I may have the good luck of another relapse: but I doubt it, the gods hate me—and naturally enough considering my usual attitude towards them.”29 But a few weeks later, Lewis wrote another letter to Greeves, implying that he still did not believe in the Christian God, but a “Spirit” or “Something” that exists “outside time and place which did not create matter, as the Christians say . . .”30 In January 1919, Lewis returned to Oxford, as a student at University College. That year he published his first book, a volume of poetry called Spirits in Bondage, under the pseudonym “Clive Hamilton.” Several of the later versions of poems in Spirits in Bondage, including “Star Bath,” were from an earlier, still unpublished work called Metrical Meditations of a Cod, which Lewis began in 1915. Most of the forty poems in Spirits in Bondage were written between 1915–1918. Some were written at home in Belfast, some while Lewis was studying with W. T. Kirkpatrick, some while he was in military training at Oxford, and some on the battlefield in France. The primary theme of all the poems is that nature is inherently evil and that if God does exist it is outside the universe. Lewis scholar, Don King, has pointed out that the overall tone of the poems “reflects an angry adolescent, shaking his fist at a God he denies, rejects, hates, fears, and yet admits to, longs for, seeks, and respects.”31 The first twenty-one poems in the collection, collectively called “Prison House,” reflect a deep pessimism about the emptiness of life

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that is often caused by war, and Lewis contrasts the beauty of nature and past, nostalgic times with the horrible present that war brings. The second half of the book, called “The Escape,” consists of nineteen poems that are far more hopeful in theme and content. Several poems, including “Song,” “World’s Desire,” and “Dungeon Grates,” lack the bitterness of tone that characterize most of the other poems, and hint that Lewis saw something hopeful beyond the material world. Spirits in Bondage did not sell well, and, over the years, compared with Lewis’s other works, has received little attention. Lewis’s brother Warren himself found much of it distasteful and commented that it would have been better if it had not been published. He wrote in the unpublished Lewis Family Papers: “Jack’s Atheism is I am sure purely academic, but, even so, no useful purpose is served by endeavoring to advertise oneself as an Atheist.”32 Lewis countered by writing to his father: “You know who the God I blaspheme is and that it is not the God that you or I worship, or any other Christian.”33 One of the surprises for Lewis in postwar Oxford was the number of people he met who were both Christian and outstanding scholars. Men like A. C. Hamilton-Jenkin, Nevill Coghill, H. V. D. “Hugo” Dyson, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield were thoroughgoing supernaturalists and their friendship kindled in Lewis a desire to investigate and find an intellectual basis for theism, or belief in God. The Christian thinkers he met at Oxford helped him overcome some of the intellectual obstacles that had kept him from Christianity. And perhaps more than anything else, they proved a formidable challenge to his atheism. Lewis met Hamilton-Jenkin (1900–1980) at University College in 1919, and he became the first lifelong friend Lewis made at Oxford. What Hamilton-Jenkin did for Lewis was to help him appreciate and celebrate life for what it was. The two friends went on many walks and bicycle rides around the countryside, and Lewis was always indebted to Hamilton-Jenkin for encouraging him to enjoy the very “quiddity” of things, to enjoy practically anything for its sheer essence and aliveness. Hamilton-Jenkin’s sheer enthusiasm for life and the created order would prove to be instrumental in reducing Lewis’s pessimism about the world. OWEN BARFIELD AND “THE GREAT WAR” Another even more influential lifelong friend Lewis made at Oxford early on was Owen Barfield, who was a student at Wadham College. Barfield (1898–1997) became Lewis’s close friend (and later solicitor) in spite of the fact that they disagreed on practically everything, and held widely divergent worldviews. They were introduced by mutual friend Leo Baker in the autumn term of 1919, and would occasionally go for walks or have lunch together,

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but they really did not see each other frequently until after graduation and when Lewis began teaching at Magdalen College in 1925. Barfield became a devotee of the anthroposophical teachings of Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s. Anthroposophy (or “spiritual science”) was an early branch of what is now called New Age Thought. It was based on a synthesis of Eastern and Christian thought and emphasized education, appreciation of art, Christian and other religious moral principles, and other practical ways to develop spirituality. Steiner taught that human consciousness is evolving, emphasized the nobility of the human spirit and various epochs of mankind, and championed a doctrine of reincarnation, immortality, and man’s union on equal footing with God. Although Barfield agreed with the basic principles of Christianity, Lewis still strongly disapproved of anthroposophy, including the period of his atheism, and after his conversion. This opposition led to much jovial but fearsome disagreement (though not quarreling) with his friends Barfield and A. C. Harwood. Lewis’s “Great War” with Barfield (named after World War One) rose from his efforts to discredit anthroposophy and dissuade Barfield from it. This “battle of ideas” between Lewis and Barfield was, according to Lewis, “an almost incessant disputation, sometimes by letter and sometimes face to face, which lasted for years. And this Great War was one of the turning points of my life.”34 The Great War was more beneficial to Lewis than Barfield. Although he never could accept many anthroposophical doctrines, especially those that dealt with Christ, Lewis did come to reject what Barfield called “chronological snobbery” (uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of the age), and to see imagination as a way of discerning truth. Barfield convinced him to accept Joy as relevant to his thinking and something that was not just an emotional or nostalgic reaction. As he moved toward theism and Christianity, Lewis saw imagination as a gift from God, which enabled him to more fully accept the supernatural, which in turn helped him to accept the truth claims of Christianity. Throughout his life, Lewis considered Barfield his truest and wisest teacher, fierce dialectician though he was. “BE CAREFUL OF WHAT YOU READ” One reason Lewis preferred reading works of fantasy, such as those of William Morris, was that in reading them, Joy had a chance to come in. While at Great Bookham with Kirkpatrick (March 4, 1915), Lewis found a copy of George MacDonald’s Phantastes in a railway station bookstall, and from that moment on, although he did not recognize it till later, his life started to turn toward Christianity. MacDonald was the writer who most

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influenced Lewis, and when he wrote Arthur Greeves with the news, he called reading Phantastes a great literary experience. Years later, he described reading the fantasy tale as at the time having no effect on his intellect or conscience, but rather it had converted or baptized his imagination. What Lewis particularly appreciated in MacDonald was how he could communicate an essentially Christian message through the medium of fantasy, imaginary worlds, and symbolism. The influence of MacDonald on Lewis lasted for his whole life. As George Sayer described it, “he was aware that it purified his imagination, making all his erotic and magical perversions of joy appear sordid and unworthy . . . It had a transforming influence on his attitude toward the ordinary, common things around him, imbuing them with its own spiritual quality.”35 And Peter Schakel elaborated: “His imagination was ‘saved’ from the directions his romanticism was taking him, toward Magic and the Occult, and was directed by MacDonald to the glory of everyday experiences and the everyday world—a crucial preliminary step toward his later acceptance of Christianity.”36 Years later in The Great Divorce, Lewis presented MacDonald as the guide to heavenly truth, whose only possible error while on earth was his belief in universalism, the ultimate redemption of all humankind. He did not think MacDonald was a distinguished writer, but he found wisdom and holiness in MacDonald’s works, particularly Phantastes, Lilith, Unspoken Sermons, the “Curdie” books, “The Golden Key,” and “The Wise Woman.” In his introduction to a tribute volume, Lewis wrote that MacDonald was his spiritual master and that he had not written a book in which he did not quote from him. Lewis also added: “What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this . . . he does better than any man.”37 After beginning his teaching career, Lewis began reading more and more distinctively Christian writers, such as Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Jacob Boehme, Samuel Johnson, George Herbert, Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Traherne, MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, and philosophers like Bishop George Berkeley and Samuel Alexander. In 1916–1918, Alexander delivered the Gifford lectures at Glasgow, which were published in 1920 as Space, Time and Deity. This work had a profound influence on Lewis and his views about Joy. After reading Alexander, he came to understand that his lifelong search for Joy was an “imprint” or “universal track” of something greater, which he slowly realized was the Absolute, or God. He wrote: “All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader.”38 Even the pagan writers that he had read and enjoyed—Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil—seemed to him to be sympathetic to

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religion and Christianity. The writers who “did not suffer from religion” and in theory those whom he should have been sympathetic with, such as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Stuart Mill, Edward Gibbon, and Voltaire, “all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called ‘tinny.’ They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth to them . . . The roughness and destiny of life did not appear in their books.”39 The most “alarming” of all the authors Lewis read was George Herbert (1593–1633), an Anglican priest, orator, and poet at Cambridge. Best known for his religious poems and the prose work A Priest in His Temple (published after his death as The Temple) and his religious poetry, Herbert perhaps had the most to say of any seventeenth century poet about finding God in the ordinariness of daily living, the little passages and small circumstances of our common lives. Lewis believed that Herbert wrote about the quality of life as we really live it through the ideals of the Christian story, and wrote it better than anyone else he had read. Lewis gave Herbert the highest compliment when he compared him to George MacDonald. Another author who had a profound influence on Lewis was G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), the Catholic convert, social critic, journalist, detective story writer, and lay theologian. Lewis said that in reading Chesterton (and MacDonald) he did not know what he was getting into, and that a young atheist like himself could not be too careful of his reading. He read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man in 1926 and was impressed with the arguments Chesterton made concerning Christianity’s view of history: “. . . for the first time [I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense . . . You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive ‘apart from his Christianity.’ Now, I veritably believe, I thought . . . that Christianity itself was very sensible ‘apart from its Christianity.’ ”40 Years later Lewis called The Everlasting Man “the best popular apologetic I know” and frequently recommended it to people curious about the Christian faith.41 Lewis knew the book was an apologetic both for Christianity and the Catholic Church, and that he continually praised and recommended it is a testimony to its power in revealing the Christ of history that Lewis came to recognize and follow. THE MOVE TOWARD THEISM In 1926, Lewis published a long narrative poem, Dymer, again under the pseudonym “Clive Hamilton.” He had started working on it at Great Bookham 10 years earlier, and the original title was The Redemption of Ask. That version has not survived, and the current version of the poem was begun in 1922. The primary theme of Lewis’s most important poem is the

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temptations of fantasies—the fantasies of love, lust, and power. This poem was a bitter and sustained attack on Christianity, picturing it as a tempting illusion that must be overcome and destroyed in one’s lifetime. In Dymer, Lewis lumped Christianity in with all other forms of supernaturalism, including occult spirituality. By the time Lewis finished and published Dymer, he had begun to have serious doubts about atheism. In the middle 1920s, Lewis had come to the realization that the Christian story (or myth) communicates truth as well as or better than literature or poetry or philosophy or even experience. By 1926 he was convinced that his search for the source of Joy was really a search for God. He had allowed his rational side to dominate his emotions for too long, but he was also wary of going too far in accepting God, and perhaps Christianity. He still believed, at least partly, that religion could be based on nothing but childish superstition. But it became clear to him that he must either accept or reject God, and he must do it soon. George Sayer reported that Lewis’s conversion to Christianity occurred over a period of about six years from 1926, the year Dymer was published, when he began to believe in a power outside of himself, to 1932, when he became a believer in Christ.42 In January of 1927 things came to a head. Lewis wrote in his diary: “Was thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord what a mess!”43 The “mess” Lewis was talking about started to sort itself out when he was thirty, and he told friends that he knew the “Spirit” was becoming more personal. In a now famous story, he had an almost mystical experience in the early summer of 1929, when he was riding on top of a wonderful double-decker bus from Oxford to his home in Headington. He recalled that he, without warning, was suddenly presented a fact about himself, that he was holding something at bay or shutting something out. “I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty . . .”44 Soon after the epiphany on the bus, in the summer term of 1929 Lewis gave in and became a believer in God. His marvelous retelling of what happened to him, transcribed in the chapter titled “Checkmate” in Surprised by Joy is a model of honesty, searing confession, and chilling introspection: “For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of ears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.”45 He went on to say that he would not be allowed to “play” at philosophy any longer, and that his idea of “Spirit” (God) was different than the God of popular religion. He called the

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God he now believed in “the Adversary,” and called himself the most “dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”46 A few months before his death, Lewis looked back on his conversion to theism and wrote: “. . . I had never had the experience of looking for God. It was the other way round; He was the hunter (or so it seemed to me), and I was the deer. He . . . took unerring aim, and fired. And I am very thankful that that is how the first (conscious) meeting occurred. It forearms one against subsequent fears that the whole thing was wish fulfillment. Something one didn’t wish for can hardly be that.”47 Although Lewis was now a believer in God, it took him about two more years to continue the process of becoming a believing Christian. His letters during this period, particularly to Arthur Greeves, indicate that he was moving spiritually, he started attending worship services with his brother, and he was reading more from authors like George MacDonald. He went to church with his brother Warren, but did not receive Communion. Although he now believed in God and the historicity of the Gospel accounts of Jesus, Lewis thought the church services dull and did not understand the sacramental system and certain ideas such as redemption and sacrifice. He did try to read the Bible regularly, particularly the Psalms, the Gospels, and Paul’s letter to the Romans. Lewis’s father Albert died of cardiac arrest on 24 September 1929; he had been very ill with cancer. Albert’s death affected and depressed Lewis greatly, because of the guilt and shame he felt over their often very bitter and acrimonious relationship, mostly Lewis’s fault. After Albert’s death, Lewis had strong feelings that Albert was still alive, that he was watching over him and would help him. His strong sense of Albert’s presence stirred in Lewis a belief in personal immortality and the possibility of an afterlife. These experiences and feelings caused him to investigate the scriptures and join a Christian church. Lewis perhaps did not realize that several years before, in April 1926, an event had occurred that provided an impetus not only for him to cross the barrier to theism, but also to faith in Christ. He had dinner that night with T. D. (“Harry”) Weldon, a philosopher at Magdalen whom Lewis called “the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew.” Weldon, to Lewis’s total surprise, remarked casually that “the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good.” Then he went on to say: “Rum thing . . . All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum Thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”48 Lewis was flabbergasted, since Weldon was always pessimistic about religion of any kind, and never, even after these comments, showed any interest in Christianity. Interestingly, in his diary entry for 27 April, Lewis wrote that Weldon believed in the Hegelian doctrine of the Trinity and was a “Christian ‘of a sort.’ ”49

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The Long Night Walk and Talk A major factor in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was that at Oxford he met and made friends with several men who were both academically accomplished and professing Christians. He met Nevill Coghill (1899-1980) in a discussion class in 1922, and Lewis immediately recognized that Coghill was not only the most intelligent and well informed man in the class, he was also a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist. Coghill went on to become a Fellow of English at Exeter College, Merton Professor of English Literature, and a world famous expert on Chaucer. Coghill was one of the bestknown and loved men in Oxford, and he and Lewis remained friends for life. Lewis met J. R. R. Tolkien in early May 1926, at an English faculty meeting at Merton College. After the meeting Lewis said that he had been warned never to trust a Catholic or a philologist, and Tolkien was both. They soon became good friends, primarily because they both loved good talk and a shared admiration for northernness or Norse mythology. In 1927 Tolkien talked Lewis into attending meetings of the Kolbitar (Coalbiters), an Icelandic Society whose members would meet usually once a week during term time to read and translate the old Norse stories and poems. Writing to Arthur Greeves, Lewis said, “One week I was up till 2:30 on Monday (talking to the AngloSaxon professor Tolkien who came back with me to college from a society and sat discoursing of the gods & giants & Asgard for three hours . . .)”50 Lewis and Tolkien had other things in common. Tolkien was a highly respected philologist, and he and Lewis worked hard to improve the “language” side of the English syllabus for the Oxford English School, which was a separate faculty of the university. As Tolkien and Lewis became friends, they gradually spent more time together, and valued each other’s opinions and talents. As early as 1929 they began meeting regularly to talk about poems, mythology, and the books they were writing. Normally they would meet on Monday mornings, but on Saturday, 19 September 1931 they met in the evening at Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. Tolkien brought with him a professor friend who was a Christian, H. V. D. (“Hugo”) Dyson, who was a lecturer in English literature at Reading University. After dinner the three men strolled around Addison’s Walk, the beautiful and secluded path that circled the deer park at the back of the college, across the little Cherwell river. For several hours they talked about history, mythology, the Christian faith, the Christ of the Gospels and more. David Downing wrote that this momentous event helped Lewis “resolve issues he had been grappling with since boyhood. In particular, it gave him a way to understand the incarnation as the historic fulfillment of Dying God myths found in many cultures.”51 About two weeks later Lewis wrote to Greeves

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and told him that he now definitely believed in Christ, thanks to the long night walk and talk he had with Tolkien and Dyson. What had been holding him back from fully accepting Christianity was the fact that he found it all irrelevant: “My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved; or ‘opened salvation to’ the world . . . What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us right here and now—except in so far as his example helped us.”52 Tolkien and Dyson explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was simply a true myth, a story that was as suggestive and meaningful in the same way as were all great stories, except that this story was true—Jesus was a historical figure, the Gospels really were fact, and that it all had really happened. Lewis continued to Greeves: “. . . the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets . . . while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’ . . . Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? . . . I am also nearly certain that it all really happened.”53 Lewis’s long night walk and talk with Tolkien and Dyson must have been very long, because Tolkien went home about three o’clock in the morning, and Lewis and Dyson at about four in the morning. Tolkien later wrote a narrative poem, Mythopoeia, in honor of Lewis, and Greeves wrote him with congratulations. A few days after the long night walk and talk, on September 22, Lewis and his brother Warren took a day trip to the Whipsnade Safari Zoo, about 40 miles from Oxford. They rode, with Lewis in the sidecar, in Warren’s old motorcycle. Lewis wrote about that day: “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. . . . It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”54 Lewis took Communion for the first time since his boyhood, on Christmas day 1931 at his parish church, Holy Trinity, in Headington. By a providential coincidence, Warren, who was by this time in Shanghai on military duty, also received Communion on that day. He had doubts for several years, and it was always a hard fight for Lewis to maintain his faith and “keep on keeping on.” Many years later, in a letter to Sheldon Vanauken, a young atheist who was seriously considering becoming a Christian, Lewis wrote these words, words that are as adequate as any in describing what the long process of his conversion finally came to mean to him: “I feel an amused recognition when you described those moments at wh. one feels ‘How cd. I—I, of all people—ever have come to believe this cock & bull story.’ I think they will do us no harm. Aren’t they just the reverse side of one’s just recognition that the truth is amazing?”55

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NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 7. A “votary” is a “devoted follower.” The “blue flower” is a term from German romantic literature used to symbolize the longing for something unknown. 2. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 5. 3. Walter Hooper, ed., “Talking about Bicycles” in Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 68. 4. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 238. 5. Richard W. Ladborough, “In Cambridge,” in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 103. 6. At times in his works Lewis seemed to be ambivalent about church attendance. In Surprised by Joy (233) he saw it as “flying his flag” (as a Christian witness) but at the same time a “wearisome ‘get-together’ affair” (p. 234). In other works and letters he remarked attendance helped one gain humility and charity (Letters of C. S. Lewis; December 7, 1950), and it continually reminded Christians of what they believe (Mere Christianity, 111). 7. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 39–40. 8. C. S. Lewis, “Religion without Dogma,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 131. 9. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), 117. 10. Walter Hooper, ed., All My Road before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922– 1927 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 122. 11. Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 702–703. Cf. James Como, Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis (Dallas: Spence, 1998), 85. 12. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 7. Lewis’s father Albert was the first Sunday School Superintendent of St. Mark’s Church, and served as a churchwarden in 1905–1906 and 1915. It was at the St. Mark’s that he met and married the Rector’s daughter, Florence (“Flora”) Hamilton, in August 1894. Her father, the Rev. Thomas R. Hamilton, was the first rector of the church. 13. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), 27. 14. Ibid., 30–31. George Sayer reported that a Sir Alexander Clutterbuck, a contemporary of Lewis’s at Wynyard and Cherbourg, said that Miss Cowie’s physcial attention to Lewis and other boys was not inappropriate and was considered “innocently motherly.” She was dismissed by headmaster Arthur C. Allen, a good teacher and administrator, who was said to be insensitive to the emotional needs of students and “harsh and intolerant” with staff. 15. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 60.

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16. Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 94–55 or 51 BC?) was an Epicurean poet and philosopher. De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) is a famous poem that champions an atomistic world outlook in which God and immortality are excluded. The poem features an extended argument that suggests that humans are purely material and cannot survive death; religion that teaches otherwise is false and mere superstition. 18. Surprised by Joy, p. 65. 18. Three of the short stories by Wells were probably “The Door in the Wall,” “The Plattner Story,” and “Under the Knife.” See Walter Hooper, ed., They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), 49. Sir Robert S. Ball (1840–1913) was an Irish astronomer, mathematician, and science teacher. Between 1877 and 1906 he wrote thirteen popular books on astronomy, including The Story of the Heavens and The Earth’s Beginnings. 19. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 62–63. 20. Ibid., 77. 21. Ibid., 115. 22. Hooper, They Stand Together, 502; letter dated December 11, 1944, 505; letter December 26, 1945. Evidently Greeves and Lewis had a “bone of contention” about the nature of the divinity of Christ for some time. They also disagreed about the providence of God. 23. Ibid., 425; letter dated October 1, 1931. A family relative told the story that when Greeves read the letter from Lewis about his conversion, he broke down and cried tears of joy. 24. Sayer, Jack, 46. 25. David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2002), 52. 26. Hooper, They Stand Together, 135; letter dated October 12, 1916. 27. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 140. 28. Sayer, Jack, 64. 29. Hooper, They Stand Together, 209; letter dated February 21, 1918. 30. Ibid., 217; letter dated May 29, 1918. 31. Don W. King, “Spirits in Bondage: A Circle of Lyrics,” in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998): 385–86. 32. Quoted in Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times, 85. 33. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters 1905–1931 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 443; letter dated March 5, 1919. 34. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 207. 35. Sayer, Jack, 57. 36. Peter J. Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 160. 37. C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 14.

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38. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 213. 39. Ibid., 213–214. 40. Ibid., 223. 41. Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 90. 42. Sayer, Jack, 129. 43. Hooper, All My Road before Me, 431–432; diary entry for January 18, 1927. 44. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 224. 45. Ibid., 226. 46. Ibid., 228–229. 47. C. S. Lewis, “The Seeing Eye,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 169. The essay was originally published in the American periodical Show in February 1963. 48. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 223–224. 49. Hooper, All My Road before Me, 379. Thomas Dewar Weldon was fellow and tutor in philosophy at Magdalen College 1923–1958. Lewis said of him, “He believes he has seen through everything and lives at rock bottom.” See 482–483. 50. Hooper, They Stand Together, 317; letter dated December 3, 1929. 51. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert, 146. 52. Hooper, They Stand Together, 427; letter dated October 18, 1931. 53. Ibid., 428; letter dated October 18, 1931. 54. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 237. 55. Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, 134–135; letter dated April 22, 1953.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adey, Lionel. C. S. Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield. Victoria, British Columbia: University of Victoria, 1978. Barfield, Owen. Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Beckett, J. C. The Lion on the Hill: A History of St. Mark’s Church, Dundela, Belfast 1878–1998. Belfast, UK: St. Mark’s Church, 1998. Bremer, John, “Clive Staples Lewis, 1898–1963, A Brief Biography.” In The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. Carnell, Corbin Scott. Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. ———. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Como, James T., Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis. Dallas: Spence, 1998. ———. ed.C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

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Dorsett, Lyle W. Seeking the Secret Place: The Spiritual Formation of C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2004. Downing, David C. The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002. Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift Of Friendship. Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2003. ———. The C. S. Lewis Chronicles. New York: BlueBridge, 2005. Freshwater, Mark E. C. S. Lewis and the Truth of Myth. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. Galligan, John S. “Slow-Paced We Come: Conversion in the Writings of C. S. Lewis.” PhD diss., Pontifical University of Rome, 1985. Gibson, Evan K. “The Star Turn of Whipsnade.” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 82 (Spring 1993): 1–5. Gilbert, Douglas and Clyde S. Kilby. C. S. Lewis: Images of His World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Hooper, Walter, ed. All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922–1927. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. ———, ed. Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters 1905–1931. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. ———, ed. Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. ———. C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. ———, ed. Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. ———, ed. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914– 1963). New York: Macmillan, 1979. ———. Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C. S. Lewis. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005. Kort, Wesley A. C. S. Lewis: Then and Now. New York: Oxford, 2001. Lewis, C. S. George MacDonald: An Anthology. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955. ———. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970. ———. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. ———. Reflections on the Psalms. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956. ———. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. New York: Macmillan, 1949.

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Madden, Leo H. “Parallels between C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy and Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven.” CSL—The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, 19(8) (June 1988): 1–5. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994. Schakel, Peter J. Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of “Till We Have Faces.” Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984.

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6

Lewis in Oxford: The Student Years (1917–1923) Will Vaus

INTRODUCTION In this essay and three others to follow in this volume, my aim is to present a chronological survey of the life and times of C. S. Lewis from his earliest days in his beloved Oxford through his twilight years spent commuting from his home in Headington Quarry outside of Oxford to the “greener pastures” of Cambridge where late in his career he accepted a coveted professorship. The sweep of a person’s life, the key moments, the treasured and despised incidences, books, encounters, shortfalls, achievements—these are the motivating factors behind my selection of details and biographical emphasis. My strategy is to move from year to year, documentary-style, in evoking the spirit of C. S. Lewis as he navigated the unusual path to acclaim and eventual personal popularity that remains unabated to the present day. Our journey starts in Oxford itself. 1916 C. S. Lewis, “Jack” to his friends and family, went up to Oxford for the first time on December 4, 1916, to sit for a scholarship examination. He delightfully described this visit in the twelfth chapter of Surprised by Joy. Upon disembarking from the train, Lewis took the wrong turn out of the train station. Unknowingly, he was walking out the Botley Road, away from the

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center of Oxford itself. He was bewildered. Could all of these ugly storefronts really be Oxford? And it seemed a much larger town than he had been led to suppose. Only when Lewis came to open country did he turn around to look. There behind him in the distance were the dreaming spires of the university. Lewis later thought of this little incident as an allegory of his whole life.1 He would spend much of his time from 1917 until 1929 walking away from the center of Christianity. However, when he finally turned around to look at what he had left behind, he caught a large view of the Christian faith in all of its glory. On that first visit to Oxford in December 1916, Lewis found lodging in a house near the corner of Mansfield Road and Holywell. The examination, given in Oriel College, took place between December 5 and 9. The first day of the exam was extremely cold. Snow began to fall, turning the dreaming spires into frosted wedding cake decorations—as Lewis later recounted. The students sitting for the exam wore greatcoats, mufflers, and gloves, even trying to write with their gloves on, if possible. The examinations consisted of a General Paper, Latin Prose, Greek and Latin unseen translations, and an English essay. The first essay was on a quotation from Samuel Johnson. Lewis had read, several times, Boswell’s rendition of the conversation from which the quotation was taken. Even the unseen translation contained pieces Lewis had translated before. Still, Lewis thought he was doing poorly; he told his father that he had almost certainly failed. In the event, he needn’t have worried. Almost on Christmas Eve, Lewis received a letter from the Master of University College, Oxford, Reginald W. Macan, informing him that University College (hereafter referred to as Univ) had elected him to a scholarship. The Master’s letter further inquired as to Lewis’s plans until next October. In response Lewis asked for Macan’s advice as to how he should spend the next few months. Macan informed him that all the students at University were enrolled in military service, except for those who were physically unfit. Therefore Lewis decided to enlist in the army and fight for England during World War I. During the Christmas holiday Lewis read The Story of Cupid and Psyche, translated by William Aldington and published by Temple Classics in 1903. This reading planted the seed that eventually flowered into Lewis’s greatest novel, Till We Have Faces.2 Over the holiday Lewis also began a prose version of what would become Dymer. This version is no longer extant. Lewis began work on the narrative poem Dymer in 1918 and it was published under the pseudonym of Clive Hamilton in 1926.3 1917 William Kirkpatrick, Lewis’s tutor who helped him prepare for entrance to Oxford University, recommended in a letter, written on January 2, 1917,

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to Lewis’s father, Albert, that Jack4 should take responsions, the Oxford University entrance examinations. Even though Jack had been admitted to University College he would not, according to the unusual Oxford system, be a student of the university as a whole until he passed responsions. Kirkpatrick thought it best to get these entrance examinations out of the way, even if Jack should end up serving in the army. “The Old Knock,” as the Lewises referred to Kirkpatrick, offered to help Jack prepare for responsions, especially the mathematics, which was not Jack’s strongest subject. Jack left Belfast on January 25, arrived in Oxford on the 26, and called on the Master of University College on the 27. The Master promised that if Jack passed responsions, to be given between March 20 and 26, he could come up to Oxford at the beginning of Trinity Term5 , in April, and join the Officer Training Corps.6 So on January 27, Jack went from Oxford to Great Bookham in Surrey to have Kirkpatrick prep him for responsions. During Jack’s time with Kirkpatrick in early 1917 he took up the study of Italian (to add to his French and German), in case he should not gain entrance to Oxford and should have to enter the foreign service. In early February he read the first two hundred lines of Dante with much success.7 Jack continued his vast reading in all of these languages, as well as in Latin and English, during this time. His reading included: Gesta Romanorum (a collection of medieval tales with morals attached to them, very like The Arabian Nights), the poetry of William Collins, Gaston Paris’s Litt´erature Franc¸aise du Moyen Age, The Life of William Morris, a re-reading of Paradise Lost; the second volume of Macaulay’s History of England, Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia, F. Anstey’s The Talking Horse and Other Tales, Bain’s The Descent of the Sun and A Heifer of the Dawn; The Amazing Adventures of Peter Schlemihls (in German), Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, The Betrothed by Manzoni (in Italian), Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Vanity Fair (attempted, not finished), The Confessions of Rousseau (in French), Tacitus (in Latin), Anne Bront¨e’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bront¨e, The Chronicles of Froissart, Sintram (in German), and Victor Hugo’s Han d’Islande (in French). It makes one tired just thinking of all that reading! Jack noted in a letter to his Belfast friend and neighbor, Arthur Greeves, how Oxford is a dangerous place for a book lover.8 How much more dangerous it must have been for a book lover like C. S. Lewis! Jack further commented about wanting to read everything,9 and it seems he almost tried to do just that. Not only did Jack write to Arthur about his reading matter, his works in progress, his first impressions of Oxford, and his smoking habits, he also continued to confide in Arthur about sexual matters, most notably, the subjects of masturbation and Jack’s own predilection for sadism. As much as Jack enjoyed living again with the Old Knock and reading to his heart’s content, that pleasant time all too quickly came to an end. Jack sat

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for responsions starting on the 20th of March and he returned to Belfast on the 27th. Soon thereafter he learned that he had failed the algebra portion of the exam. However, he was allowed to come into residence at Univ during Trinity Term in order to enter the army via the University Officers’ Training Corps (OTC). He arrived back in Oxford on April 26 and matriculated on the 28th. Jack was supposed to prepare for a second go at responsions, to be taken again the following term, and so began algebra lessons with John Edward Campbell of Hertford College. On April 30 Jack joined the OTC and had a physical exam. He weighed 182 pounds and measured 5 feet 10 and 3/4 inches. The commanding officer noted that Jack was likely to make a useful officer but would not have sufficient training to enter the Officer Cadet Unit until the end of June.10 Jack’s first impressions of college life were focused on the small number of students, a dozen all tolled at Univ. The Hall was in possession of the blue-coated wounded, as were some of the rooms. Still, Jack was quite pleased with his installation at the oldest of the Oxford colleges,11 especially since it boasted one of his favorite poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, as an alumnus. Jack particularly liked the statue of the deceased Shelley that he passed every morning on the way to his bath.12 No real reading or study was planned for Jack by his Oxford tutor since he would soon be joining the OTC.13 The Oxford tutorial system, being unique, deserves some explanation. Unlike most other universities, every undergraduate student at Oxford is assigned a tutor for particular subjects. The tutor is a fellow, or don, of one of the Oxford colleges and is usually also a lecturer on his or her subject of expertise. The tutor tells the student which lectures to attend, assigns reading, and, in the case of English, for example, assigns the student a weekly essay topic. In the case of English, the student brings the assigned essay to his or her weekly meeting with the tutor, reads the essay; the tutor makes comments and then gives the student his or her assignment for the upcoming week. Thus at the beginning of Jack’s Oxford student days, while he was assigned a tutor, he was not assigned any particular work, as he would soon be entering army life. Despite having no school work, Jack continued his own reading, including: Gautier’s Un Trio de Romans (in French), the second volume of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris, the poems of James Thomson, Renan’s Vie de J´esus, The World’s Desire by Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, Blackwood’s Prisoner in Fairyland; Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (in Italian), and Barrett’s Psychical Research. Obviously Jack did not need the prompting of any tutor to keep him reading great literature. In his spare time Jack went out on the river during the glorious spring weather of 1917. He even learned, from his roommate Lawrence Edgell, how

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to row. However, Edgell was a bit of a trial to Jack at that time because Edgell was a man of limitless piety, as Jack put it.14 In other words, Edgell’s religious views, and the vociferousness with which Edgell held those views, rubbed Jack’s atheistic skin the wrong way. A comparison of one of Jack’s letters to Arthur at this time, with one written to his father, reveals that Jack continued to lie to his father about participation in Christian worship services.15 Somehow Jack just couldn’t bring himself to the point of admitting openly to his father that he was no longer a Christian. However, Jack did enjoy discussing religion with another fellow student, John Robert Edwards, who had been an atheist and was, at that time, in the process of becoming a Catholic.16 One particularly lovely Sunday morning in May, rather than attending church service as his father would have liked, Jack bicycled with some fellow students down to the Cherwell River, with all the spires of Oxford gleaming in the sunlight and bells ringing everywhere. This was to be Jack’s first experience of a place he would frequent often throughout his years at Oxford, a place known as Parson’s Pleasure. Here “without the tiresome convention of bathing things” Jack enjoyed a bathe with his new college friends.17 Jack’s military duties while at college during the Trinity Term of 1917 consisted of morning parade from 7:00 to 7:45 a.m., with another parade from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. In addition there were occasional evening lectures on map reading and other subjects.18 On June 7, Jack joined a cadet battalion and thus moved from Univ to Keble College, Oxford, for a four-month course on soldiery. As an Irishman, Jack was exempt from the Conscription Act. As a member of the OTC he was not part of the regular army and could resign at will. However, during the war, members of the OTC did become part of the regular army. As a result, the army used the members of the OTC as needed. Keble College had been used since 1915 for the training of officers. Jack was just one of many who arrived there on June 7. Jack’s roommate at Keble was a fellow Irishman, E. F. C. “Paddy” Moore from Clifton College, Bristol. Paddy was born near Dublin, the son of Courtenay Edward Moore and Janie King Moore. Paddy’s parents separated in 1907 and Mrs. Moore took Paddy and her daughter Maureen to live in Bristol where Mrs. Moore’s brother resided. When it was known that Paddy would enter the army through the Oxford OTC, Mrs. Moore and Maureen followed Paddy to Oxford where they acquired rooms in Wellington Square. Jack eventually became acquainted with Paddy’s mother and sister, thus beginning a relationship that would shape his entire life.19 Jack described Paddy as a little too childish for real companionship in a letter to his father on June 10, and too virtuous for “common nature’s daily food” in a letter to Arthur on the same date. However, Jack developed a very friendly relationship with Paddy and the Moores over time. He mentions

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meeting Mrs. Moore in a letter to his father on June 18. Jack spent a week in her home in Oxford along with Paddy sometime in August.20 And in a letter to his father on September 10, Jack refers to Mrs. Moore as his friend. Once Jack entered the cadet battalion he had no time for reading or writing during the week. His days consisted of trench digging and route marching. Much to his father’s dismay, Jack was not able to enter an artillery unit because of his weakness in mathematics. Jack had leave from army life on the weekends, from 1 p.m. Saturday to 11 p.m. Sunday. During this time he went back to his rooms at Univ. One night he wandered around the college and inspected the room of a student then serving at the front. It was rather eerie to Jack as he wondered whether the young man, in whose rooms he stood, had been killed yet. Despite the overhanging gloom of the war, there were some good times during Jack’s weekends off. He enjoyed a celebration with two friends, Butler and Dodds, who had just received first class degrees.21 At this party Jack got drunk for the first time in his life.22 Jack also enjoyed getting back to reading on the weekends: Maeterlinck’s plays (in French), the Opera by Agrippa, Samuel Johnson, Homer (in Greek), Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods (in German), The Faerie Queene, Noyes biography of William Morris, Benson’s The Angel of Pain, A Modern Utopia by Wells, and the Subjective Idealism of Bishop George Berkeley in his Principles of Human Knowledge. Jack especially appreciated Berkeley’s three dialogues written to prove the existence of God by disproving the existence of matter. Furthermore, Jack’s correspondence with Arthur continued uninterrupted during the weekends. In his letter to Arthur of June 10, Jack mentions for the first time the idea of gathering his own poems together and submitting them to a publisher.23 On July 24, Jack mentions having no patriotic feeling for anything in England, except Oxford for which he would live and die.24 In the same letter Jack comments on his liking the prose style of Malory, Bunyan, Ruskin, and, interestingly enough, the Authorised Version of the Bible. Jack went home on leave to visit his father, August 9–11. Warnie paid a visit home starting on the 14th, then visited Jack in Oxford on the 22nd. The latter was to be Jack’s last visit with his brother before the two were shipped off to France as soldiers. He took responsions again on September 25 and once again he failed the mathematics portion of the exam. However, he was no longer deeply concerned about the matter. During the summer he had learned that six month’s service in the army would exempt him from ever having to take responsions again.25 Oxford University would eventually admit him as a student without him ever passing the entrance examination in mathematics.

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The day after responsions, Jack received a temporary commission in the army and was given a month’s leave. On September 29 he went with the Moores to their home in Bristol, thus revealing his preference for their company over that of his father. By October 3 he caught a cold and was sick in bed, cared for by Mrs. Moore. He did not go to visit his father until October 12. While Jack was in Bristol, Paddy learned that he had been placed in the Rifle Brigade, eventually taking off for France. It was during this visit that Jack and Paddy made a pact that if one of them should die in the war the other would look after Jack’s father and Paddy’s mother.26 Mrs. Moore and Maureen were both witnesses to the agreement between Paddy Moore and Jack Lewis, and both women commented on it in later life. Jack was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry on October 16, during his time in Belfast. While Jack was home on leave he discussed with his friend Arthur his relationship with Mrs. Moore.27 Afterward he felt he had said too much on the subject and requested that Arthur never mention it again.28 In a letter to Arthur from France, Jack thanked him for writing on his behalf to Mrs. Moore; Jack mentioned how glad he was that the two people who mattered most to him in the world were now in touch.29 On the 18th of October, Jack left Belfast to join his regiment at Crownhill, South Devon.30 He spent his days in Devon leading groups of men on parade and then handing them over to their instructors. During his time in Devon Jack, once again, continued his voluminous reading, including: Hawthorne’s Transformation; the first two volumes of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur; George Eliot’s Adam Bede; The Ultimate Belief by Clutton-Brock; and Dobson’s Eighteenth Century Essays. On November 5, Jack wrote to his father saying that word was going around that his regiment would be transferred to Ireland for active service.31 However, the hope of spending the war in Ireland was short-lived. On November 15, Jack wired his father that he was with the Moores in Bristol on 48-hours leave and that he would have to report to Southampton on Saturday, obviously for embarkation to France. Albert Lewis, either through misunderstanding or due to the sheer fact that he hated to leave his home in Belfast, never went to see his youngest son off from Southampton. This sad mistake on Albert’s part, along with Jack’s preference for Mrs. Moore’s company, eventually led to an almost total breakdown in the relationship between father and son. Jack embarked for France on November 17, arriving in the trenches on his nineteenth birthday, November 29, 1917. (Since the matter of Jack’s military service is covered in-depth in another essay in this volume, I only touch briefly on the key events of Lewis’s wartime experience.)

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1918 February 1–28, 1918, Jack was hospitalized in the British Red Cross Hospital at Le Treport, suffering from trench fever. Though glad to be away from the battle front, he feared his return to the trenches once he recovered. He joked, in a letter to Arthur, about the gods hating him, which he figured was natural enough considering his usual treatment of them. On March 4, Jack did rejoin his battalion. By the end of the month Paddy was killed in action, though this was not confirmed to Mrs. Moore until September. On April 15, Jack was wounded in action at Mount Bernenchon, ´ near Lilliers, in the Battle of Arras, and hospitalized in Etaples. On May 25, he was transferred to Endsleigh Palace Hospital, London. The pieces of shrapnel in his chest gave him no serious trouble. He made light of the fact that he had brought in about sixty German soldiers as prisoners. During his hospitalization, and even while in the trenches, he had never ceased his wide reading, including Milton, Scott, Trollope, Boswell, George Eliot, Cellini, and Balzac. Perhaps the greatest effect of the war on Jack was that he came to regard matter (shells, bullets, animal fears, and animal pains) as evil and Beauty, or Spirit, as the ultimate good.32 This is not to say that Jack came to believe in God at this time, least of all a god who would punish him for the “lusts of the flesh.” However, he had come to believe that he had within himself a chip off the block, so to speak, of universal spirit, and that he should be careful not to let matter dull the spark of the spirit.33 As Jack got increasingly better during his hospital stay in London he was allowed out on occasion. In mid-June he went to hear Wagner’s The Valkyrie in Drury Lane and on June 16 he visited the Kirkpatricks at Great Bookham. Jack discovered the Old Knock in the garden among the cabbages wearing his Sunday clothes and smoking his pipe. Jack was led into the house with much triumph and displayed to Mrs. Kirkpatrick, whom he found fussing with the maid, just as he knew her to do in the past. For Jack there could hardly have been a more delightful afternoon.34 When Jack had the opportunity, at the end of June, of choosing a convalescent hospital in England to which he could be sent, he chose one in Bristol, so as to be close to Mrs. Moore. Jack looked back on the events of the previous few months and gave thanks for his good fortune. Many in his battalion had died. By July, Jack was copying out the final version of his manuscript of poems to be sent to a typist before making the round of publishers. November 11, 1918, the Armistice was signed. On December 24, Jack was discharged from the hospital and demobilized from the army; he was able to go home and celebrate Christmas with his father and brother, arriving at the family home, Little Lea, on December 27.

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1919 By January 13, Jack was back in Oxford and ready to begin his studies in earnest. Those studies consisted in the Classical Honour Moderations course in Greek and Latin literature. This was the first part of what is called at Oxford—Literae Humaniores or “Greats.” This course involves the study of Greek and Roman classical literature in the original languages. Jack had before him the immediate prospect of reading all of Homer, Virgil, Demosthenes, and Cicero, plus four Greek plays and the study of logic. Thankfully for Jack, it was a continuation of the classical studies he had begun in preparatory school. Today classics students at Oxford have the option of beginning to learn Greek and Latin at university. Jack of course went in with this knowledge already under his intellectual belt. He had the option of going straight on to the Final Honour School, that is the second half of Literae Humaniores, but Jack’s classics tutor, Arthur Poynton, advised him that taking Honour Mods would stand him in better stead for later obtaining a teaching fellowship at university.35 In a letter to Arthur36 Jack described a typical day as an Oxford student. He would be awakened by his scout at 7:30 a.m. All undergraduates at Oxford in those days had scouts who would serve them. This would be followed by a bath, chapel, and breakfast in Hall. After breakfast Jack would work in the library or attend lectures. Among his favorite lectures in those early days were those of Gilbert Murray on the Bacchae by Euripedes. At 1 p.m. Jack would bicycle out the Cowley Road to the Moore’s house. (Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen had moved permanently to Oxford to be close to Jack.) After lunch Jack would study on his own until tea, followed by more study until dinner. Jack would then bicycle back to college by 11 p.m. where he would read some more until midnight. Jack was surprised at first by the level of independence he was granted in his studies at Oxford. He would see his classics tutor only once per week. Jack liked his tutor, but in a letter to his father described the work as pretty stiff. However, for a self-motivated student like C. S. Lewis, the course work proved to be exhilarating. In addition to his studies Jack quickly joined a college literary club called the Martlets. The society was limited to twelve undergraduate members and out of all the college clubs at Oxford, the Martlets was the only one, in its time, to have its minutes preserved in the Bodleian Library. The first minutes on record in the Bodleian date from 1892. Jack was elected as secretary, remarking to his father that if he was forgotten for all else, at least a specimen of his handwriting would be preserved at Oxford.37 Jack’s first paper read to the Martlets was, not surprisingly, on one of his favorite authors, William Morris.

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The descriptions of the scenery of Oxford that Jack wrote in his letters to Arthur and his father reveal that he was already developing a keen ability for helping his readers to “see” what he was writing about. On February 9 he wrote to Arthur: As you come out of our college gate you see All Souls and just beyond it the grey spire of St Mary’s Church: you know what real Gothic is like: all little pinnacles with every kind of ornament on them and in the snow they look like a wintry forest hung up against the dark sky, and always associated in one’s mind with the sound of bells.38

On March 20, 1919, William Heinneman published Jack’s first book: Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics under the pseudonym of Clive Hamilton. Jack had chosen to write under a pen name while still a soldier during World War I out of concern for what his fellow officers might think if they found out he was a poet.39 When the book was initially accepted for publication Jack wrote to his father saying that this bit of success gave him a pleasure that was perhaps childish, yet akin to greater things.40 The main theme of this cycle of lyrics, as Jack noted in a letter to Arthur, was that nature is evil and God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmos.41 The book received a few short reviews of little consequence. The Times Literary Supplement found the lyrics to be “graceful and polished” but seldom rising above the “commonplace.”42 The review in The Bookman was more glowing, saying that Lewis’s cycle of lyrics “confidently claim a place in the great tradition.”43 Jack took his spring break from college to help Mrs. Moore clear out some of her things from her former home in Bristol and move them to Oxford. Then he spent the days from April 2 to 24 in Belfast. For some time Albert Lewis had been concerned about the amount of time Jack was spending with Mrs. Moore. Around this time Albert began to discuss the subject with his eldest son, Warren, or Warnie, as he was called by family members. In a letter to Warnie, Albert referred to Jack as an “impetuous, kind hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill.”44 The ongoing relationship between Jack and Mrs. Moore was of grave concern to both Albert and Warnie, neither of whom could fully understand what was going on. Perhaps the greatest concern had to do with finances. Mrs. Moore received only a small amount of financial support from her husband, and so the bulk of expense for Jack and the Moores’ joint household fell to Jack himself. Apparently he supported the household out of the £67 that his father gave him each term.45 The result was that Jack and the Moores lived at poverty level. Jack found his father’s inquiries into his affairs to be more intolerable than ever. He wrote to Warnie that he wished he had a small income to fall back upon in case of emergency, in other words, in case his father should withdraw his support on account of Mrs. Moore.46

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According to Albert’s diary, the already tense relationship between Jack and Albert grew worse during Jack’s visit home in August of 1919.47 Albert inquired about Jack’s financial situation. Specifically he asked if Jack had any money to his credit at university. Jack lied, telling his father that he did. Albert caught him in the lie, to which Jack responded that he had tried to give his father his confidence but that his father had never given him his. Jack proceeded to bring up incidents from his childhood in which he claimed that his father had treated him and Warnie badly. He then told his father that he had no respect for him, nor confidence in him. This break in the relationship between father and son caused Albert great heartache. He realized that part of the problem went back to the fact that he had not visited Jack in hospital during the war. But it seems Albert never fully understood his own contribution to the ruptured relationship. Jack wrote to Arthur in September that his father was insisting on occupying the position of judge, jury, and accuser in the whole affair. Jack failed to see how there could be any real reconciliation between him and his father without any acknowledgment of failure from Albert.48 Jack wrote to Albert in October, confessing that the things he had said to him in August were as painful to say as they must have been to hear, but that it was better to be honest rather than remain silent. Jack suggested that the confidence and affection they both desired would best be restored by honesty and toleration on both their parts.49 Perhaps if both Jack and Albert had been able to follow a maxim that Jack later quoted in a letter to Arthur on another subject, then their rift could have been healed sooner: “Tout comprende c’est tout pardonner.”50 To understand all is to forgive all. Back at Oxford in the autumn of 1919, Jack Lewis met Leo Baker, a student of Wadham College. Together they compiled an anthology of poems that they hoped to have published by Basil Blackwell, of Blackwell’s Bookshop fame. The anthology was never published. But it was Baker who introduced Lewis to another man who would become a lifelong friend—Owen Barfield, also of Wadham. Jack later described Barfield as the anti-self, a friend who shared all his interests, but looked at them from a completely different angle.51 The commitment of Barfield and another friend, A. C. Harwood, to anthroposophy52 later brought a great shock to Jack; he had thought these friends, at least, to be safe from such “superstitions” as he called them.53 In the long run these friends, especially Barfield, caused Jack to reconsider his whole atheistic position. 1920 Beginning on March 4, 1920, and continuing for eight days, Jack took examinations in Classical Honour Moderations. These exams included unseen

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translation from Latin and Greek into English, prose composition consisting of the translation of English prose into Latin and Greek, the works of Homer and Virgil, and logic. On the first day of the exam Jack had a swollen gland in his throat that was very painful. Over the course of the next few days he experienced one night with practically no sleep at all, and he could hardly eat anything. Yet, at the end of it all Jack took a first in Honour Mods.54 At the end of Hilary term in 1920, Jack went on holiday to Washford, Somerset, along with the Moores, rather than going home to Belfast. Jack kept as a secret from his father the fact that the Moores were with him on vacation; he fabricated a story about hiking with a male friend in Somerset. He made up for this by visiting his father, along with Warnie, during the long summer vacation. In a letter to Arthur during this holiday Jack described an experience of Joy he had while in Somerset. He talked about the old feeling coming into his mind, a feeling associated with Wagner and Morris’s Well at the World’s End, a feeling that Jack had not had in over a year.55 Perhaps the reason why Jack had not had this experience of Joy, or longing, or what the Germans call sehnsucht, in over a year, was because he had banished it from his life. In Surprised by Joy he describes how, during his first two years at Oxford, he was busy assuming a “new look” that consisted of no flirtations with the supernatural and no romantic delusions, in the sense of delusions propagated by the reading of romantic literature.56 At the beginning of Trinity Term, Jack moved into digs with the Moores in Headington, two miles outside the center of Oxford, having spent the required three terms in college rooms at Univ. Jack began “Greats” and wrote to his father on May 1, telling him that he now had two tutors, one for philosophy, E. F. Carritt, and one for history, George Hope Stevenson.57 Once again Jack’s previous studies in classical Greek and Roman philosophy and history were standing him in good stead. He had only to go over in more careful detail ground already covered. However, the work was still stiff—including one philosophical and one historical essay written every week. Perhaps the most significant development in Jack’s life during the year 1920 was that he came, through his course of study in philosophy, to the point of having to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable philosophic theory. However, he maintained that human beings still know nothing for certain.58 Jack had moved from atheism to agnosticism, then to a belief, as he called it, in the Absolute.59 1921 The beginning of 1921 saw a change in history tutors for Jack from George Stevenson to Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke, the great-grandson of the

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composer Felix Mendelssohn.60 By the beginning of May, Jack was knee-deep in Roman history. Once again he was reading Tacitus, whom he had read previously with his tutor, William Kirkpatrick.61 One of the most important academic activities in Jack’s life in early 1921 was his work on an essay of approximately 11,000 words on the topic: Optimism. For this English essay Jack won the Chancellor’s Prize on May 24; he read a portion of his essay at Encaenia62 in June. Other than nearly falling down as he entered the rostrum63 Jack felt his public reading of the essay came off well. In the essay itself Jack dealt with the “difficulty of God or no God” by proving, at least to his own satisfaction, that it really made no difference whether there was such a person.64 The development of Jack’s theological views at this time was influenced by several factors. One of those factors was Jack’s conversation and correspondence with his friend, Leo Baker. In a letter to Baker written on February 25, 1921, Jack maintained that blind faith was unsuitable for people like he and Baker who knew too much and saw life too widely. He felt the view of the universe presented by the Bible was too comfortable and that one ought to use the data one has in developing a worldview, even if that worldview should lead only to destruction.65 On the other hand, Jack also indicated his skepticism about Buddhist belief in a letter to Baker written in July of the same year. He said that he could not believe in the Buddhist denial of the Self, the real existence of the Self being involved in everything we think. For Jack at that time, Buddhism was clearly inferior to Christianity, at least as a creed for ordinary human beings. He said he could sometimes feel a desire for Nirvana, but most of the time he wanted something with a more positive joy.66 Jack summed up his belief about God at this time in a line to Baker, which he repeated in a letter to Warnie. According to Jack, the trouble with God was that he is like someone who never answers your letters, so in time you come to the conclusion, either that God does not exist, or that you have his address wrong.67 Jack’s theological beliefs at this time were also influenced by a desire to steer clear of all spiritualism. In March of 1921 he had a couple of meetings with W. B. Yeats and was put off by the poet’s interest in magic.68 Jack was also put off by his encounters with the Reverend Doctor Frederick Walker Macran whom he called, in Surprised by Joy, “an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson.”69 This man apparently had a wholly selfish interest in spiritualism, his only concern being in the survival of something he could call “himself.” Jack determined that any thoughts that would lead a person to such a fierce monomania should be shunned at all cost. The whole idea of immortality thus became disgusting to him. In March of 1921, Jack’s former tutor, William Kirkpatrick died. Jack told his father that he owed to Kirk as much as one person could owe to another

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human being, at least in the intellectual realm.70 Kirk’s death raised for Jack, once again, the whole question of annihilation. Despite his apparent lack of interest in immortality, Jack mused in a letter to his father, that the real person while alive is so different from the mere body that is left behind at death that it makes it impossible to believe that something has turned into nothing.71 During the long summer vacation of 1921, Jack’s father came on holiday over to England and they traveled together, along with Jack’s Uncle Gussie and Aunt Anne Hamilton, down to Cornwall by automobile. By the ruse of telling his father that he had moved out of college into digs with another very busy male student, Jack was able to prevent his father finding out about his living accommodations with Mrs. Moore.72 By the end of 1921, Jack was looking forward to the completion of Greats in the coming year; he hoped that he would be finished, at long last, with his education, and finished with financial dependence upon his father.73 This, however, was not to be the case. 1922 On April 1, 1922, Jack began keeping a diary. On April 2 he recorded the fact that he had begun the composition of Dymer, a long narrative poem in rhyme royal, which would eventually be published in 1926.74 In May, Jack also began a verse version of Till We Have Faces that would eventually be published in prose in 1956.75 In a letter written on May 18, Jack began to discuss with his father his future options. One of his tutors suggested that he stay on at Oxford for another year after Greats and take another school, that is, another subject. The tutor suggested that if Jack did so, Univ would almost certainly continue his scholarship. The obvious choice of another school for Jack was English literature, a rising and fairly new subject at Oxford at that time. The thought behind this suggestion from Jack’s tutor was that if he was able to obtain a first or second class degree in Greats and a first in English the following year, he would be in an excellent position for obtaining a fellowship at Oxford. While Jack was pondering this option he discovered that the course of study for English had been altered, allowing an option for focusing almost entirely on English literature and less on the development of the language, with the exception of some study of Anglo-Saxon.76 Albert wired back to his son on May 22, approving this course of action and agreeing to fund Jack’s further education.77 From June 8 to 14, Jack took his examination in Greats, which involved six hours of writing every day for six days.78 On July 28, Jack had his viva voce79 examination in Greats. On August 1, Jack and the Moores moved into a house called Hillsboro at 14 Western Road (later renamed Holyoake Road), Headington. They stayed there until September 5 when they moved back,

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temporarily, to 28 Warneford Road. On August 3, Warnie came to Oxford for a visit and ended up staying with Jack at Hillsboro, meeting the Moores for the first time. On August 4, Jack learned that he had received a first class degree in Greats, thus becoming a Bachelor of Arts80 ; he immediately wired his father the good news.81 In October, Jack began reading English Language and Literature. His English tutor was F. P. Wilson, later one of the editors of the Oxford History of English Literature, who would one day invite Jack to contribute the volume on the sixteenth century to that series. Jack’s tutor for Anglo-Saxon was Edith Elizabeth Wardale of St Hugh’s College.82 One of the first things Jack did in his study of English literature was to attend George Gordon’s discussion class, which he found very invigorating. It was there that he also made a new friend in fellow student Nevill Coghill. However, there was a shock in store for Jack; Coghill was, in addition to being the most intelligent and best-informed student in the class, a Christian. This disturbing fact about Coghill joined with a larger disturbance Jack was encountering in his reading. He was beginning to find, through his English studies, that all the authors he enjoyed the most had Christianity in common (MacDonald, Chesterton, Langland, Donne, Thomas Browne, George Herbert). Even among ancient authors it was the most religious ones (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) that he found most nourishing. On the other hand, the authors he should have been in agreement with (Shaw, Wells, Mill, Gibbon, Voltaire) he found to be most lacking in depth.83 On December 23, after Jack’s first term of English studies, he and Warnie met in London and traveled from there to Belfast to spend the Christmas holiday with their father. Jack stayed at Little Lea until January 12, 1923, thereafter returning to Oxford to continue the English school.84 1923 Because Jack had decided to go through the English school in only one year, instead of the normal three-year program, he had only two terms left to prepare for the examination. His shortened study time was interrupted by having to care for Mrs. Moore’s brother, Dr. John Askins, who was going insane. The Doc stayed with them from February 23 until March 12, when he was taken to hospital in Henley.85 Jack later described this experience in Surprised by Joy, saying how he had held the Doc while the latter was kicking and screaming; Askins had delusions that he was falling into hell.86 He eventually died on April 5 of that year. As the Doc had been involved in spiritualism, this experience was one more warning to Jack to steer clear of all such activities. He subsequently wrote to Arthur Greeves, telling his friend of his experience

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with the Doc, warning him to avoid introspection, brooding, spiritualism, and everything eccentric.87 Jack himself was scared off anything mystical for a long time to come.88 Following Askins’s funeral Jack and the Moores found out they could move back into Hillsboro, the house they had enjoyed so much the previous summer. Consequently, a good part of Jack’s time during the month of April and May was spent trying to fix up the new place in preparation for their move.89 During this entire time, as Jack was finishing the English school, he was also doing whatever he could to bring in a little extra money. He was correcting School Certificate essays90 and tutoring students on the side.91 He was also applying for every Oxford fellowship for which he qualified, all to no avail. Albert offered to keep his son at Oxford some years longer if he thought it would do any good.92 Thus Jack planned to remain in residence at Oxford for at least another three years and even do a research degree such as a B.Litt. or a D.Phil., which might better qualify him for a university teaching position.93 In the midst of this harrowing time of fairly dire poverty, while Jack experienced almost daily anxiety about his future job prospects, he did, nonetheless, have some merry meetings with various friends. One of those meetings took place on May 29 with Alfred Kenneth Hamilton-Jenkin, a fellow student and one of the first lifelong friends Jack made at Oxford. Jenkin and Lewis discussed an idea for a horror play in which a scientist discovers a means for keeping a brain and motor nerves alive in a corpse by means of injections.94 Jack eventually used this idea in his own novel, That Hideous Strength. From June 14 to 19, Jack took his examinations in English Language and Literature. The first day he had Old English in the morning followed by a history of the English language in the afternoon. The next day it was Middle English in the morning followed by Chaucer in the afternoon. The third day there was no morning paper. In the afternoon there was an examination on the age of Shakespeare. Jack had a break on Sunday followed by more examinations on Monday: a paper on Shakespeare and Milton in the morning followed by a paper on the seventeenth century in the afternoon. The final day of examinations Jack wrote papers on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was also on the last day of exams that Jack found out the Exeter fellowship he had been hoping to get went to someone else. He departed from this examination period feeling dejected and thinking he had done poorly on a number of the papers.95 On July 10, Jack had his viva voce examination for English from which he came away slightly more encouraged.96 Finally, on July 16, Jack learned that he and his friend Nevill Coghill were the only students that year to receive first class degrees in English Language and Literature.97 Jack immediately wired his father the great news. Warnie best summed up Jack’s accomplishment when he later wrote:

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When we reflect on the circumstances of Clive’s life during the time he was reading this School . . . we are astounded at the extent of an achievement which must rank as easily the most brilliant of his academic career.98

Still, Jack’s Triple First at Oxford was not enough to immediately obtain him a teaching position at the university. It would not be until May of 1924 that the door to an Oxford fellowship would be opened a crack to the well-qualified Clive Staples Lewis. NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 175. 2. Walter Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume 1 (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 268. 3. Ibid., 269. 4. “Jack” was the nickname that C. S. Lewis adopted for himself at the age of four. I use his nickname for several reasons, first of all, to distinguish him from the other Lewises—his brother Warren (Warnie) and his father Albert. Secondly, I use the nickname “Jack” because few people who knew C. S. Lewis, so far as I know, ever called him “Clive.” Therefore I risk familiarity in favor of simplicity in a biographical essay such as this one. 5. The University of Oxford has three terms: Michaelmas, which begins on October 1 and ends on December 17; Hilary, which begins on January 7 and ends on March 25, or the Saturday before Palm Sunday; and Trinity, which begins on April 20 or the Wednesday after Easter, whichever is later, and ends on July 6. 6. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 266–267. 7. Ibid., 275, 279. 8. Ibid., 269. 9. Ibid., 277. 10. Ibid., 294. 11. Univ claims to have been founded in 812 by King Alfred the Great. However, this claim remains disputed. The more accepted date for the founding of the college is the year 1249. 12. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 298. 13. Ibid., 295–296. 14. Ibid., 301. 15. Ibid., 303–306. 16. Ibid., 307. 17. Ibid., 304. 18. Ibid., 305. 19. Ibid., 315–316. 20. Ibid., 334.

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21. Oxford, as well as other British universities, awards degrees in certain honors classes, similar to the Latin honors system used in American universities. Thus, at Oxford, an undergraduate may receive First Class Honours, Upper Second Class Honours, Lower Second Class Honours, Third Class Honours, or an Ordinary Degree (Pass) according to how he or she performed in his or her examinations. A Double First can refer to first class honours in two separate subjects, such as classics and mathematics, or else it can refer to first class honours in the same subject in subsequent examinations, such as Classical Honour Moderations followed by the Final Honours School. In Lewis’s case he was to obtain a rare Triple First, that is, he obtained First Class Honours in Classical Honour Moderations, the Final Honours School, and English Language and Literature. 22. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 319. 23. Jack later left his manuscript book containing his Metrical Meditations of a Cod with Arthur in Belfast. By the end of 1917 he asked Arthur to send it on to Mrs. Moore in Bristol. 24. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 330. 25. Ibid., 316. 26. Ibid., 336–337. 27. There has been, for some time, a great deal of discussion in Lewis studies regarding the exact nature of the relationship between Jack and Mrs. Moore. The most definitive answer to the question of whether there was a sexual relationship between the two was given by Maureen Moore. According to Lewis’s biographer, George Sayer, Maureen once told him that Jack and her mother had been, for a time, lovers. Their sexual relationship continued until Jack’s entry into the Church of England. [See Jeffrey Schultz and John West, The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 247.] Jack’s relationship with Mrs. Moore after the war is the “huge and complex episode” which he left out of his autobiography. [See Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 188.] 28. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 339. 29. Ibid., 348. 30. Ibid., 338. 31. Ibid., 344. 32. Ibid., 371. 33. Ibid., 379. 34. Ibid., 385. 35. Ibid., 428. 36. Ibid., 424–427. 37. Ibid., 430. 38. Ibid., 431. 39. C. S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1984), xxxv. 40. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 396.

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41. Ibid., 397. 42. Ibid., 446. 43. Ibid., 457. 44. Ibid., 451. 45. Ibid., 452. 46. Ibid., 455. 47. Ibid., 462. 48. Ibid., 465. 49. Ibid., 470. 50. Ibid., 475. 51. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 189. 52. “Anthroposophy,” in the Greek language, literally means “human wisdom.” It is a philosophy developed by Rudolf Steiner who lived from 1861 to 1925. Steiner defined anthroposophy as a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe. The goal of the anthroposophist is to become more human by becoming more conscious and deliberate about one’s thoughts and deeds. One may reach higher levels of consciousness through meditation and other practices. Steiner believed in the historical reality of the Incarnation and had a positive view of Christ, though one very different from the standard Christian view. Lewis strongly disagreed with anthroposophy when Barfield and Harwood became adherents in 1923. Lewis argued against it, first as an atheist, and later as a Christian. 53. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 194–196. 54. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 477. 55. Ibid., 478. 56. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 190. 57. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 485. 58. Ibid., 509. 59. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 197–199. 60. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 516–517. 61. Ibid., 541. 62. Encaenia is the transliteration into English of a Greek word, which in John 10:22, is often translated as “feast of dedication.” This Jewish feast of dedication or renewal we know today as Hanukkah. Encaenia corresponds to the term “Commencement” from the Latin, used in many North American universities as the designation for the graduation ceremony. At Oxford, Encaenia is the ceremony held annually on the Wednesday of the ninth week of Trinity Term. At this ceremony the university awards honorary degrees to distinguished men and women and commemorates its benefactors. The ceremony has taken place annually in the Sheldonian Theatre since 1670 and prior to that in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. On the morning of the ceremony the heads of colleges and other university dignitaries, along with those to be honored, assemble, in full academic dress, in one of the colleges where they

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enjoy peaches, strawberries, and champagne. They then proceed to the Sheldonian Theatre by a walk through Broad Street. Each person receiving an honorary degree is introduced by the Public Orator with a speech in Latin. 63. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 556. 64. Ibid., 557. 65. Ibid., 520. 66. Ibid., 567. 67. Ibid., 555. 68. Ibid., 524–525, 530–532. 69. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 191. See also Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 547. 70. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 535. 71. Ibid., 539–540. 72. Ibid., 569. 73. Ibid., 588. 74. C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1991), 15. 75. Ibid., 30–31. 76. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 591–592. 77. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 39. 78. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 593–594. 79. An oral examination. 80. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 602. By an unusual Oxford custom every B.A. automatically becomes an M.A. after a certain period of time. Thus, by the time Jack became an Oxford fellow he had attained the degree of Master of Arts. 81. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 599–600. 82. Ibid., 600. 83. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 201–202. 84. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 603. 85. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 202–218. 86. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 192. 87. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 605. 88. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 221. 89. Ibid., 229–234. 90. Ibid., 166. 91. Ibid., 219. 92. Ibid., 250. 93. Hooper, C. S. Lewis, 610. 94. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 238. 95. Ibid., 243–245. 96. Ibid., 255–256. 97. Ibid., 257. 98. Ibid.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Hooper, Walter, ed. C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume 1. London: HarperCollins, 2000. Lewis, C. S. All My Days before Me. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1991. ———. Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1984. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955. Schultz, Jeffrey and John West. The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.

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Lewis in Oxford: The Early Tutorial Years (1924–1939) Will Vaus

1924 The year 1924 began as a difficult year for C. S. “Jack” Lewis. He was continuing to apply for every Oxford fellowship for which he was qualified, but without any positive response. In addition, his scholarship at University College had run out, so he was forced to ask his father Albert for additional financial support. In order to enhance his qualifications for a fellowship, Jack continued his studies with a view toward a possible Doctor of Philosophy dissertation at Oxford. However, in May of 1924, Jack received some good news. His former philosophy tutor, E. F. Carritt, was going to the University of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to teach philosophy for a year. Jack was asked by the Master of University College (“Univ”) if he would undertake Carritt’s tutorials and give some lectures in philosophy during Carritt’s absence. Jack would be allowed to pursue a permanent placement at the same time. The job only paid £200 per year but it got Jack’s foot in the door for an Oxford fellowship. He immediately wrote to his father telling him the good news and letting him know he would still need some financial support from home. Jack accepted the position and immediately began preparing by going over all the “Greats” reading he had already done as a student, this time with a view toward teaching the material as a tutor. Jack was concerned about the

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lectures that would require 14 hours of talking for the whole term. He told his father that he could probably tell the world everything he knew in five hours! Jack worked diligently throughout the summer of 1924 writing notes for each of his lectures. He had as his goal to learn, right from the beginning, how to talk to students, and not merely read a lecture. Tuesday, October 14, 1924, at 10 a.m. was the day and hour of C. S. Lewis’s first lecture at Oxford University. He spoke on the subject of “The Good, its position among values.” Unfortunately he was scheduled to speak at the same time as a much more senior and popular lecturer in the university, and the announcement for Jack’s lecture said that he would be speaking at Pembroke, not Univ. In the event, only four people showed up for Jack’s first outing as a university lecturer. As far as tutorials were concerned, Jack found those to be easy at the time, though he was rather tired at the end of the day. He was very conscientious about preparing for his students, even going so far as to study up on football so as to be able to make small talk with one of his pupils who was the college football captain! He also took a special interest in the personal issues and problems of some of his better students. 1925 By the end of his year-long appointment Jack was getting nervous about obtaining a permanent position. In April of 1925, a Fellowship in English was announced at Magdalen College, Oxford. Jack put in for it but was not too hopeful of obtaining the job after so many rejections. In applying for the position at Magdalen (pronounced “Maudlin”), Jack asked for testimonials from his former English tutor, F. P. Wilson, and George Gordon, Merton Professor of English. However, they had already given their support to Jack’s fellow student and friend, Nevill Coghill, who had also applied for the job. Thankfully, Coghill obtained a position at Exeter College and so Wilson and Gordon then felt free to throw their support behind Jack. Subsequent to this, Jack was invited to dine at Magdalen “under inspection.” Then the President of Magdalen, Sir Thomas Herbert Warren, asked to meet with Jack privately. Warren wanted to know if Jack would be willing to tutor students in philosophy, in addition to English. Jack later told his father he would have been willing to tutor a flock of performing birds in the quad if Magdalen would give him a job. The next day, May 20, Jack received a phone call asking him to come to Magdalen. Upon entering the college he was met by the President who told him that he had been elected. The pay began at £500 a year with provision of rooms, a pension, and a dining allowance. The election was probationary, for five years. Elated, Jack immediately sent a telegram to his father. An

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announcement of the appointment appeared in The Times on May 22. Then Jack wrote a more detailed letter to his father on May 26 thanking him for his undying support over the past six years, which helped him to succeed in the end. In August, Jack was formally admitted to Magdalen College as a fellow. In the presence of the entire faculty of the college, President Warren addressed the new fellow for five minutes in Latin. Jack guessed correctly that “Do Fidem” was the appropriate reply. Then he knelt before the President on a red cushion, after which Warren took him by the hand and raised him with the words: “I wish you joy.” Unfortunately, while rising Jack tripped over his own gown. He would later freely confess that he wasn’t good at any sort of ritual. Jack then made the rounds, each faculty member wishing him joy. It seemed a fairly odd greeting by the twenty-fifth repetition. Jack thought it might have come off slightly better in a French or Italian university. In September, Jack journeyed home to Belfast for yet another visit with his father. However, now that he was not financially dependent upon Albert the relationship proceeded with greater ease. When Jack returned to Oxford he was assigned the white-paneled college rooms that he would inhabit for the next 29 years: Staircase III, Number 3, of New Building, new in 1733 that is. To his astonishment he discovered that he was expected to fully furnish the rooms himself. Carpets, tables, curtains, chairs, fenders, fire irons, coal boxes, table covers, and other furniture cost him £90 all totaled. Jack wrote to his father saying that his external surroundings were beautiful beyond belief. From his large sitting room he could look out upon the Magdalen deer park with nothing to remind him that he was in a town. His smaller sitting room and bedroom had a gorgeous view of the fifteenth-century tower1 and sand-colored Cloisters of Magdalen. And within a minute of sitting at his desk Jack could be stretching his legs down Addison’s Walk beside the Cherwell River. Magdalen College was founded in 1458 by William of Wayneflete. Though not one of the very oldest colleges of Oxford University it is easily the most beautiful. On the 1st of May every year the college choir sings in the dawn from atop the 144-foot-high bell tower that is one of Oxford’s finest and most prominent landmarks. The college is noted for its wealth of gargoyles, grotesques, and stone portraits of notable people. Little could Jack Lewis have known in 1925 that he would become one of the most famous dons in the history of Magdalen. 1926 On Saturday, January 23, at noon, the neophyte Oxford scholar C. S. Lewis gave his first lecture in the English School on “Some Eighteenth Century

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Precursors of the Romantic Movement.” He modestly selected the smallest lecture room at Magdalen, only to have a crowd of undergraduates in attendance, proving too large for the allotted space. Jack played the pied piper as he led his students across the High Street, suspending traffic, en route to another lecture room. A typical day during term time would begin with Jack being awakened at 7:30 a.m. by his scout bringing him hot water for washing and shaving. Next Jack would go for a morning stroll along Addison’s Walk, followed by breakfast in the Senior Common Room at 8. Once Jack became a Christian he attended chapel from 8:00 to 8:15 a.m.2 From 9 a.m. to about 1 p.m., Jack would usually tutor various students. In the afternoon Jack would ride his bicycle or take the bus out to his home, “Hillsboro,” in Headington, two to three miles east of Magdalen. There he had lunch, took the dog for a walk, and helped Mrs. Moore with domestic chores. Jack returned to college in the evening where, as part of his appointment, he would enjoy a free dinner in hall. After dinner the dons would retreat to the Senior Common Room to enjoy after-dinner wines, fruit, and nuts. However, Jack did not go to the Common Room more than two or three times per week. He had too many other activities to attend to. Monday night there was play-reading with his undergraduate students.3 Every other Tuesday night was a meeting with the Mermaid Club, reading Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan drama.4 On alternate Tuesday nights Jack would meet with the Kolb´ıtars, an informal club made up of dons and professors founded by J. R. R. Tolkien for the purpose of reading Icelandic sagas in their original language.5 On Wednesday nights Jack would teach a class for undergraduates in Anglo-Saxon. These events became known as his Beer and Beowulf evenings.6 Thus the weekend nights were the only evenings Jack had completely free to linger in the Senior Common Room after dinner in hall, meet individually with colleagues, work on academic projects, write letters, and read.7 Jack’s reading in 1926 included G. K. Chesterton, whom he considered to be the most sensible man alive, apart from his Christianity. Some time early in 1926 he read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. For the first time he saw the whole Christian outline of history in a way that seemed to make sense. Jack was beginning to lose the spiritual chess game he was playing. He would later put The Everlasting Man on his Top Ten List of books that did the most to shape his philosophy of life.8 Several days after his first participation in the Magdalen May Day celebration, Jack recorded in his diary his first meeting with a man who would become a life-long friend, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, then Professor of Anglo-Saxon.9 At the time, Jack described Tolkien as a smooth, pale, fluent little chap interested more in the language, rather than the literature part of

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the English School. “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” Jack later wrote that his subsequent friendship with Tolkien marked the breakdown of two old prejudices: one being the Ulster-Protestant prejudice against Roman Catholics, the other—an English faculty prejudice against philologists.10 He didn’t know it then, but his friendship with Tolkien would lead him to spiritual checkmate. In September, Jack had another literary achievement, his narrative poem Dymer was published by J. M. Dent, under the same pseudonym he had used for the publication of Spirits in Bondage: Clive Hamilton. He used a pseudonym because he didn’t want it known broadly around Oxford that he was writing poems.11 As Jack later noted in the introduction to the 1950 edition of Dymer, the poem is “the story of a man who, on some mysterious bride, begets a monster: which monster, as soon as it has killed its father, becomes a god.”12 Jack and his brother Warnie spent the Christmas holiday of 1926 with their father. Unbeknownst to them, it was the last time all three of them would be together. Albert remarked in his diary that it was a very pleasant holiday: “Roses all the way.”13 1927 In January of 1927, Jack noted in his diary the philosophical muddle he was in at that time. This muddle consisted of scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis rubbing shoulders with orthodox idealism and rationalism inherited from his former tutor, William Kirkpatrick. Jack sincerely hoped that his work on his new poem, The King of Drum, might clear away the muddle.14 In April of 1927, Jack’s brother Warnie sailed for China to continue his military service there. During the Easter holiday Jack wrote to his brother describing in great detail a walking tour he immensely enjoyed with three friends: Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood, and Walter Ogilvie “Wof ” Field. The four men hiked from Goring, south of Oxford, all the way across Wiltshire to Shepton Mallet in just six days, logging a total of over 80 miles! This was the first of many annual walking tours Jack enjoyed with various friends.15 In July 1927, Jack voted with other faculty members at Oxford to limit the number of female students at the university.16 I have argued elsewhere that C. S. Lewis was not a misogynist, at least after he became a Christian.17 However, prior to his conversion, and in his role as a tutor, he seemed to fit in with the attitude of other male tutors and was somewhat afraid of female students.18 He certainly enjoyed the company of men in college more than

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women. Consequently, he did not relish the opportunity of teaching a class of girls from Lady Margaret Hall once per week beginning in the Trinity Term of 1926.19 But once the class got underway Jack seemed to do quite well at teaching women and, to his delight, found some of his female students to be quite bright.20 In the summer of 1927, Jack continued the School Certificate examining he had performed previous summers. This involved a trip to Cambridge as one of the more delightful components.21 This was followed by a vacation in Cornwall with the Moores, this time in Perranporth, where Jack relished the glorious surf-bathing. Interestingly enough, Jack was still trying to keep his ongoing relationship with Mrs. Moore a secret from his father.22 Jack had tried for the last two years to get his father to take a vacation away from his home in Belfast, perhaps at a spa, since Albert’s rheumatism was becoming a great concern to both his sons. However, Jack was unsuccessful in his repeated attempts to spirit his father away from Little Lea. So, in September of 1927, Jack went to spend a whole month with his father in Belfast. During this visit Jack worked on developing an Encyclopedia Boxoniana, compiling all of his and Warnie’s writings and drawings from childhood.23 He visited his father again during the Christmas holiday of 1927. Both of these visits were far less enjoyable for Jack without the presence of his brother Warnie who was still in China. It would appear that the year 1927 saw the end of C. S. Lewis keeping a diary. As Owen Barfield once noted, at this stage of his life Jack “deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals.”24 In Surprised by Joy, Jack associates the discontinuation of his diary with his conversion to theism, which did not happen until 1929. But whether it happened in 1929 or earlier, in 1927, one thing is for certain, Jack Lewis gradually began to take less interest in the progress of his own opinions and the states of his own mind. The closer he came to God, the more he was taken out of himself.25 1928 In the early part of 1928, Jack was continuing his studies on the sixteenth century; he had in mind to write a book about Erasmus and his contemporaries. While he never did write a book about Erasmus his studies eventually did bear fruit in his volume entitled: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. While working on this project Jack would spend each morning in the Bodleian Library, and each evening attempting to develop a better working knowledge of German. Jack’s description of the Bodleian is classic. He commented in a letter to his father that if the Bodleian just had upholstered chairs and you

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could smoke, then it would be the most delightful place in the world.26 In fact, when one becomes a Bodleian Reader one must take an oath saying: I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.27

Jack would often sit in Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest part of the Bodleian, dating to the fifteenth century. There he would order the books he wished to peruse, and they would be brought to him from the bowels of the Library somewhere underground. Jack would then sit and read in his “box” between the shelves of ancient chained books, with a little mullioned window on his left, looking down into the garden of Exeter College, beneath a painted ceiling emblazoned with a pattern containing the crest of the university with the motto: “Dominus Illuminatio Mea.”28 The only drawback to all this beauty and antiquity is that it would often weave a spell over Jack, more conducive to dreaming than to actually studying. In April, Jack wrote to his brother Warnie in China, reporting on his Christmas visit to their father. Jack lamented the fact that there would be no more visits home during which one could count on having time to oneself, for their father was going to retire in May from his work as a solicitor. Jack also mentioned in his letter to his brother that he was deep into the study of “medieval things.” This was a reference to the beginning of his studies that would one day issue in the publication of The Allegory of Love. A third point of news was a report of Jack’s Easter walking tour with friends, this time in the Cotswolds.29 Jack also exchanged a number of letters with Owen Barfield during the late spring and early summer of 1928. The items most worthy of note are Jack’s mention of the publication of Barfield’s book, Poetic Diction, Jack’s own work on the Romance of the Rose, their mutual plans to read Aeschylus together (they often met to read Greek plays or other literature aloud to one another), and Jack’s invention of the word mythopoeic to describe the science of the nature of myths.30 By July, Jack was reporting to his father that he had begun the first chapter of what would become The Allegory of Love. This necessitated putting the work on Erasmus on the back burner.31 The Michaelmas term of 1928 saw Jack beginning a series of lectures on “The Romance of the Rose and its Successors.” He was also busy in the autumn of that year joining in the election of a new President of Magdalen, George Gordon, and starting the Michaelmas Club, a literary society for Magdalen undergraduates.32

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1929 1929 was a defining year for C. S. Lewis in two major ways. First of all, it was in the Trinity Term of 1929 that Jack became a theist. This was the result, as has been suggested earlier in these biographical essays, of a long and gradual process. Sometime before the Spring of 1929, Jack became aware, while riding home on the bus from college one day, that he was holding something at bay. Simultaneously he recognized that he could either shut or open the door of his life to this something, or to this Someone.33 He felt that God was closing in on him, and at the same time he realized that he didn’t particularly like it. Following this experience Jack made an attempt at pursuing complete virtue in his life and he also examined his soul with the purpose of bringing himself into harmony with what he then called “universal Spirit.” Upon examination he found that his life was filled with lust, ambition, fear, and hatred. He felt like the demon-possessed man in the Gospels whose name was Legion. In his attempts at moral virtue Jack found that he could not even last 1 hour without recourse to prayer.34 Jack describes his conversion to theism in such classic and memorable terms in Surprised by Joy that there is no need to repeat his entire description here. Suffice to say that when Jack could no longer evade the presence of the Almighty, he finally knelt in his room at Magdalen and confessed that God was God. He felt himself to be “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”35 The second most important event in the life of Clive Staples Lewis in 1929 was the sickness and death of his father in the autumn of that year. Jack spent most of August and September at home in Belfast nursing his father. During these days Jack was troubled by the fact that he had so little affection for Albert, though he cared for his father’s physical needs most dutifully. At the same time, looking so much like his father, Jack felt he was losing part of himself.36 In mid-September an operation revealed that Albert had colon cancer. Following the advice of the doctors, who thought Albert might live for some time, Jack returned to Oxford on September 22. He received news on September 24 that his father’s condition had worsened. Jack immediately departed again for Belfast, but his father died on September 25, while Jack was en route. Albert’s funeral took place in the family church, St. Mark’s Dundela, on September 27. Warnie was not present during Albert’s illness, death or funeral, as he was detained in China on military service. Following Albert’s death, Jack learned that Warnie would not be able to come home until April 1930.37 Thus Jack was left to settle his father’s estate

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by himself. And it was only after Albert’s death that Jack began to realize how much he was going to miss his father. Jack wrote to Warnie commenting on how his father used to “fill a room” even though physically he was not a very big man. Now that Jack had total freedom at his childhood home, Little Lea, that very freedom became beastly to him.38 However, the emptiness of loss was followed by peace for Jack Lewis. Once he returned to Oxford for the Michaelmas term of 1929 he wrote to Arthur about the delight of waking up each morning with a sense of peace, and safety and home. It was a gradual but “delicious” recovery from a time of horror.39 Even the experience of Joy was beginning to come back to him more frequently.40 And following Jack’s conversion to theism he was trying to spend more time in meditation.41 Vital to the growth of his spiritual life at this time was his reading, especially MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul and Bunyan’s Grace Abounding.42 In December, Jack returned to Belfast, with Mrs. Moore accompanying him for the first time. Minto, as Jack often called her, helped a great deal in deciding what to do with so many of Albert’s things. However, it must have been a strange psychological experience for Jack to bring this woman into Little Lea, after spending so much time over the preceding decade trying to keep his relationship with her a secret from his father.43 1930 One place where Jack must have felt keenly the loss of his father was in his correspondence. Since school days Jack had been exchanging letters regularly with Albert, often weekly. To whom was Jack to write now that his father was dead? Jack’s letters to Arthur Greeves filled the gap. The correspondence between these two friends, which had lapsed for a time, was now resumed with vigor. In July of 1930, Jack wrote to Arthur saying there were a great many subjects on which Arthur was the only person to whom he could write, the only person who would understand. He told Arthur that the common ground they shared represented the deepest stratum of his life.44 One of the things Jack wrote to Arthur about was the friends who were helping him along his spiritual journey; one of these friends was Alan Griffiths,45 whom Jack later said was one of his chief companions on this stage of the road.46 Griffiths was a former English student with whom Jack kept in close contact. Like Jack, Griffiths was on a journey toward Christian faith, later described in his book, The Golden String. Jack urged Griffiths to read more philosophy after going down from Oxford, to make up for not having read “Greats.” Griffiths later wrote about Jack: “. . . it was through him that my mind was gradually brought back to Christianity.”47

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Another important friend along this stage of the journey was Hugo Dyson, a teacher of English at Reading. Having met him once, Jack determined to get to know him better and so invited him to spend a night with him in his college rooms. Jack wrote to Arthur that Dyson was a man who loved the truth, one who made literary activities depend upon religion and philosophy.48 Jack also wrote to Arthur very explicitly about his own spiritual progress. Though Jack sometimes felt like he wasn’t making headway he still tried to do those things outwardly which might lead to progress. One of those outward acts was attendance at morning Chapel in college. He began this spiritual practice on a regular basis during the Michaelmas term of 1930.49 Even though he wasn’t yet a Christian, Jack felt it was important to “fly the flag” of his new commitment to theism in some way.50 In Jack’s external life one of the big events of 1930 was his brother Warnie’s return from China. Warnie left Shanghai en route to Great Britain on February 24. His trip home included stops in Japan and the United States. He arrived back in England on April 16, immediately following another one of Jack’s walking tours with Barfield and company.51 Warnie had been away from home exactly three years and five days.52 Jack and Warnie left for Belfast on the 22nd and returned to Oxford on the 24th of April. In his diary Warnie sorrowfully described the sight of their father’s grave, next to their mother’s, with its freshly turned soil and a handful of withered daffodils. Little Lea was as blank as a frame from which a picture had been stripped. On this visit the brothers finished preparing things to be moved from Little Lea to Oxford, and they buried in the back yard an old attic trunk filled with their childhood toys.53 On May 15, Warnie took up his new post at the army base at Bulford, on Salisbury Plain. By the 25th of the month he had made the decision to join up with the Moore/Jack Lewis household as soon as it became possible for him to do so. Warnie returned one last time to Little Lea, staying there from the 1st to the 4th of June. The house was finally sold in January 1931 for £2,300.54 The other great outward event of Jack Lewis’s life in 1930 was the purchase of a home in Headington Quarry known as The Kilns, so named because of the abandoned brick kilns then on the property. On July 6, Jack and Warnie went to see the outside of the house for the first time. It was at the end of a very little used road, affording them much privacy. Situated at the bottom of Shotover Hill, the house was surrounded by a large garden with hard tennis court and woods beyond that. In the midst of the wood was a pond where Jack would eventually take a daily swim in good weather. Both Jack and Warnie were delighted with the whole place. Jack, Mrs. Moore, and Warnie bought the house for £3,300 and moved in on October 10.55 Jack described the house, in a letter to Arthur, as having

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a good night atmosphere. He concluded that good life must have been lived there before them.56 This was quite a contrast to his feeling about Little Lea, a house that had been “well suffered in.”57 1931 In January 1931, Jack and Warnie took their first walking tour together. This journey took them from Chepstow up the River Wye to Tintern Abbey, then on to Monmouth, Ross and Hereford. After seeing Tintern Abbey Jack commented in a letter to Arthur: “All churches should be roofless. A holier place I never saw.”58 Around this time Jack happily learned that Warnie had come around to thinking that the religious view of things was true. They started attending church together at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, a short walk from The Kilns. The biggest event of 1931, perhaps of Jack’s entire life, took place in September. On the third weekend of that month Hugo Dyson came to stay with Jack in his rooms at Magdalen. J. R. R. Tolkien joined them on Saturday evening and they ended up talking until 3 a.m. The conversation began in Addison’s Walk shortly after dinner and was focused on the topic of metaphor and myth. They were interrupted by a rush of wind and the fall of autumn leaves around them that filled each with a sense of awe. The talk continued in Jack’s rooms and drifted from Christianity to the difference between love and friendship then back to poetry and books. When Tolkien left at 3 a.m. Jack and Dyson continued talking until 4 a.m., striding up and down the cloister of New Building.59 Their discussion of Christianity focused on the doctrine of Redemption. Jack could not make sense of how the life and death of Christ saved the world.60 What Dyson and Tolkien pointed out to him was how much he liked the idea of sacrifice in a pagan story, that is in the myth of the dying and rising god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus). Dyson and Tolkien then went on to emphasize to Jack that the story of Christ was simply a true myth, a myth that works on the soul in the same way as the pagan myths but with the tremendous difference being that it really happened. This discussion convinced Jack that the Christian story was to be approached in the same way, in a sense, as the pagan myths, also that the Christian story was full of meaning. Finally, as a result of his conversation with Dyson and Tolkien, Jack was nearly certain that the story of Christ really happened in the manner described in the Gospels.61 Eight days later Jack went on a motorcycle journey, riding in Warnie’s sidecar, to Whipsnade Zoo. As he later recounted in Surprised by Joy, when he and Warnie started out for Whipsnade he did not believe that Jesus Christ

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was the Son of God, but when they reached the zoo he did.62 What is most interesting about Jack’s account of his conversion to Christianity in Surprised by Joy is that he totally leaves out any mention of the important conversation he had with Dyson and Tolkien eight days before the journey to Whipsnade. In that sense Jack’s testimony is very Pauline, for Paul, in telling the story of his own conversion, eventually left out any mention of Ananias.63 Consequently, on October 1, Jack wrote to Arthur telling him that he had just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ. He mentioned that his long talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a lot to do with his conversion to Christianity. Furthermore, he noted that he had just finished reading The Epistle to the Romans, the first Pauline letter he had ever seriously tried to read. To Jack at that time Romans contained many difficult and horrible things but, importantly, it also contained what he then called MacDonald’s idea of death, namely that “All that is not God is death.”64 By the end of 1931, Tolkien was dropping in on Jack every Monday morning for a drink and talk. These weekly meetings were the first glimmers of what would become The Inklings.65 And by the end of the year Warnie was back in China for another tour of duty. Unbeknownst to one another, on Christmas Day, thousands of miles away from each other, both Jack and Warnie attended church and took Communion for the first time as Christians.66 1932 In his letters to his brother and to Arthur in 1932, Jack began to discuss various topics of importance to Christianity. Arthur questioned why there was no doctrine of the atonement in the Gospels. Jack’s answer was that the Epistles, which were written before the Gospels, reveal that the Apostles did teach the doctrine of the atonement, and they did so immediately after Christ’s death and resurrection. This being the case, it is hard to imagine that they didn’t get this teaching from Christ himself. At any rate, Jack argued, if you take the sacrificial aspect out of Christianity then both Judaism and Paganism are deprived of all significance.67 In a diary letter to his brother, Jack discussed the place of the sacraments within Christianity. He was, at that time, upset by the fact that the vicar of Holy Trinity, the Reverend Wilfrid Savage Thomas, was trying to make it impossible for his parishioners to hear the sermon without also taking Communion. Jack preferred to take Communion only once per month in his early days as a Christian. Furthermore, he agreed with MacDonald that the Christian should view all meals as sacraments. Jack had a hard

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time understanding in what special sense the serving of Communion in church was a sacrament. At any rate, he wanted to read more about the subject.68 In his letters to Warnie and to Arthur, Jack also discussed the subject of prayer. Writing to his brother on February 21, 1932, Jack noted that the efficacy of prayer is no more of a theological problem than all human acts. God’s providential governance of the universe takes into account all our free acts as human beings, including our prayers.69 When Arthur asked Jack to pray for him, the latter immediately wrote back saying: “I do.” Jack wasn’t sure if the act of his praying did any good for his friend, but he was sure it did good for him. He couldn’t pray for change in Arthur without seeing the same need in himself. This served as a check to Jack’s pride.70 Apparently in one of his letters, Warnie had asked Jack why he thought Christianity had so little penetrated the East. Jack’s response was that for some undisclosed reason people in the East were being allowed to live “B.C.,” just as some African tribes were still in the Stone Age. He also noted that time is not as important to God as it is to us.71 Jack later speculated in his Broadcast Talks that we do not know what God’s plans are for the people who have not heard of Christ or been enabled to believe in him. We know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who hear of Christ and profess faith in him in this life will be saved through him. In the meantime, if we are worried about those who are outside of Christianity we have our marching orders, our job is to share Christ with them.72 After Easter, Jack went on another walking tour, this time with Barfield, Griffiths, and a man named Beckett. The hike took them from Eastbourne to Midhurst on the South Downs Way.73 Another highlight for Jack in the spring of 1932 was the realization of a 20-year dream; on May 16, with the help of Barfield who purchased the ticket, Jack got to see a performance of Siegfried in Covent Garden.74 In the summer of 1932, Jack paid a visit to Arthur in Belfast. He stayed at Bernagh, the Greeves’ family home, across the street from Little Lea, from August 15 to 29. It was during this fortnight holiday that Jack wrote what would become his first published book as a Christian, The Pilgrim’s Regress.75 This was the story of Jack’s own spiritual journey in allegorical form, from his Christian upbringing, to atheism, and back to Christian faith again. As stated in the subtitle, The Pilgrim’s Regress is an allegorical apology, or defense, of Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, the latter two being the pathways that led Jack back to faith in Christ. By the end of 1932, Warnie had returned to England from the Far East for good, having put in for retirement from the Royal Army Service Corps. He

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moved into The Kilns and a wing was added to the house to accommodate him. Jack was thrilled. 1933 In January 1933, Jack wrote to Guy Pocock, an editor with J. M. Dent who published Dymer, asking if they would be interested in considering The Pilgrim’s Regress for publication. Jack described his new book as an up-todate version of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Pocock immediately wrote back saying that the firm would indeed like to consider Lewis’s new book. Then on February 2, Pocock wrote to Lewis saying that Dent wanted to publish the book. This was a very quick decision for a publisher!76 The Pilgrim’s Regress was released on May 25, 1933. The first edition contained Jack’s Mappa Mundi on the end papers and was dedicated to Arthur Greeves. The book received a number of good reviews but unfortunately only 650 out of the first 1,000 copies printed were actually sold.77 Jack took this failure in stride; now that he was a Christian he no longer seemed so concerned about his own success or failure as he was when Dymer and Spirits in Bondage did not sell well.78 In early 1933, Warnie was enjoying settling into life at The Kilns, doing much gardening, reading, and playing of Beethoven’s symphonies on his gramophone for his brother and Minto every Sunday night. At the same time Jack was having a delightful time reading a children’s story that his friend Tolkien had just written: The Hobbit. Jack described the book in a letter to Arthur as precisely the kind of book either of them would have longed to read or write in 1916.79 In May, Jack was back at Covent Garden, this time with Barfield in tow, for a performance of Das Rheingold. Jack enjoyed this less than Siegfried the year before.80 But the music of Wagner still brought the Joy of Northerness home to his heart. In the summer Jack was once more acting as an English examiner, a job that he dreaded each year he had to do it. However, he took a very personal interest in how his students performed in their examinations. In July of 1933, Jack wrote to one of his students, Mary Shelley Neylan, who had received a Fourth in English, consoling her with the words that her real quality was far and above the work she did in her examinations.81 After grading exams Jack took off with his brother Warnie on a visit to Scotland to see their uncles. The highlight of the trip was not the visit with their relations but the time the brothers were able to spend alone together. In one of Jack’s letters to Arthur he has a delightful description of a glorious hour he and Warnie shared bathing in a golden brown mountain stream, putting their heads under a waterfall, and sitting naked beside the stream to eat their sandwiches after their bath.82

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In September, Jack was again writing to Arthur, this time answering Arthur’s question about how far God could sympathize with human evil. In this letter Jack formulated the distinction, which he was later to emphasize in his Broadcast Talks, between Dualism and Christianity.83 Jack pointed out to Arthur that God, according to Christian doctrine, has no opposite; he is above good and evil. Evil itself is simply a corruption of good. God not only understands but shares our desire for complete happiness. The difference is that we as human beings try to obtain that happiness in the wrong way. God knows the only way we can obtain it, and is merciless in trying to lead us to that good end in the right way.84 In November, Jack wrote to Arthur about a very definite evil: the rise of Hitler. He pointed out Hitler’s stupidity as well as his cruelty summarized in one quote: Hitler had claimed that the Jews had made no contribution to human culture and that by crushing them he was doing the will of the Lord. Jack pointed out to Arthur that the very concept of “the will of the Lord” came from the Jews. He also noted the attitude one should have toward tyrants, depicted in his chapter about Mr. Savage in The Pilgrim’s Regress. 85 1934 In the spring of 1934, Maureen Moore took her mother and Jack by car across England and then on the ferry to Ireland. Jack celebrated Easter in Kilkeel, County Down, that year, while his brother remained in England. Jack remarked in a letter to Warnie how he thought the English practice of only attending church if one was a believer was better than the Irish practice of compulsory church attendance, mere cultural Christianity.86 In a letter to Griffiths written from Ireland at the same time, Jack articulated his belief in the possible salvation of those outside the visible church. He believed that it was possible that Divine Grace might guide certain people, outside of Christianity, to focus on the true elements in their own religions, and that it might be the will of God to save certain people in that way. Jack later embodied this belief in the character of Emeth in The Last Battle.87 It should be noted that Lewis’s belief was different from that of universalism, or the idea that all religions lead in the same direction. He clearly believed that human beings are saved only through Christ. He simply held out hope that some are saved through Christ without knowing the same in this life.88 In the same letter to Griffiths, Jack articulated his growing understanding of St. Paul and his growing understanding of his own vocation. In regard to the latter Jack noted that his position as an English teacher did not allow him to teach the most important things, that is, Christian doctrine. However, he felt there was honest work for him to do as a teacher of English literature, the

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work of eradicating false habits of mind as well as teaching elements of reason. On the whole Jack felt like he was becoming a better person through being a tutor, better than the person he would have been if he had been allowed to focus solely on research. He was also grateful for the friends he made among each generation of students.89 One of those students in 1934 was Sister Madaleva, a teacher of English at Notre Dame, who attended Lewis’s lectures on “Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Poetry” in the Trinity Term of that year. Lewis responded to one of Sister Madaleva’s letters saying that the key to mastering an understanding of the Middle Ages was to know the Divine Comedy and the Romance of the Rose really well, along with the Classics and the Bible, including the apocryphal New Testament.90 Through correspondence with a female colleague, Dr. Janet Spens, Lewis learned of a book that he would have to read, Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love. Though Lewis would not, in the end, agree with all of Nygren’s views, the book contributed, in some manner, to what Lewis would later write in The Four Loves.91 Another book, to which Arthur Greeves introduced Jack, would prove to be the spur to the writing of another one of his books, or actually a series of books. The book that Arthur recommended to Jack in December 1934 was David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus.92 Jack was not able to obtain a copy right away, but once he had read the book it helped inspire him to write his own Cosmic Trilogy.93 It was Lindsay’s book that gave Jack the idea that theology could be smuggled in under the cover of science fiction.94 1935 In the spring of 1935, Jack went on yet another walking tour, this time alone with Owen Barfield. The pair took off across Derbyshire, which Jack subsequently described to Arthur as being more like his ideal country than anything he had yet seen. It was, to Jack’s mind, like the delectable mountains in Bunyan. In the same letter to Arthur Jack lamented the destruction of the countryside around The Kilns. As a result of the growth of Morris Motors, about a mile from The Kilns, many new houses were being built on the once vacant Kiln Lane.95 Lewis and Tolkien were both disturbed by the industrialization of Oxford in their lifetime and their environmental concerns were reflected in their writing. In April, Jack took up, once again, his lapsed correspondence with his friend Leo Baker, the fellow Oxford student who had introduced him to Barfield. In reporting on developments in his own life, Jack told Baker of the death of his father and how he regretted the poor relationship he had with Albert.

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In describing himself Jack was rather humorous: “I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist. I think that is all my news up to date.”96 On the serious side Jack noted how he and all of his friends had grown to discover that they were not great men, but that there was nothing to mind about this. There are more important things in the world, and outside of the world, than human greatness.97 In a letter to the American critic and philosopher Paul Elmer More, Lewis described his reasons for disliking the poetry of T. S. Eliot. He felt that by reading Eliot others would be infected with the spirit of chaos, and that one could write poetry about disintegration without writing disintegrated poetry as Eliot had. On the flip side More told Lewis of an interesting comment Eliot had made about Lewis himself. During a visit to Magdalen College, Eliot overheard the comment of one of Lewis’s colleagues in regard to Lewis’s attendance at college chapel. The colleague said something to the effect of: “Lewis has been attending chapel for weeks unbeknownst to us. What can it mean?” Eliot’s quip was: “It’s evident that if a man wants to escape detection at Oxford the best place for him to go is to chapel!”98 In the winter of 1935, Lewis was invited to contribute the volume on the sixteenth century to the planned Oxford History of English Literature. He at first deferred but then accepted the invitation of his former tutor, F. P. Wilson.99 Jack was able to report to Arthur in December 1935 that he had completed work on what was to be The Allegory of Love to be published by the Clarendon Press in May 1936. In addition, Sheed and Ward, a Catholic publisher, had bought the rights to The Pilgrim’s Regress from J. M. Dent. In the end Jack was sorry he had given consent to Sheed and Ward to publish The Regress.100 The reason for Jack’s chagrin was the blurb that Sheed and Ward put on the jacket of the new edition. The part that disconcerted Lewis read as follows: “The hero, brought up in Puritania (Mr. Lewis himself was born in Ulster), cannot abide the religion he finds there.”101 Jack resented the implication of the blurb that the book was an attack on his own country of Northern Ireland and his Protestant faith. Indeed many readers took Lewis to mean that he had become a Catholic, due to his own use of the name “Mother Kirk.” As he later explained in a letter to Griffiths his reason for using this name was because he did not want to keep introducing the Lord as a character, and he felt that “Christianity” was not a plausible name for a character either.102 Lewis and Griffiths also corresponded about differences in their beliefs now that the former was a confirmed Anglican and the latter a Catholic monk. Jack wrote to Griffiths pointing out that one of the things they disagreed about was the comparative importance of their disagreements. Griffiths looked at Jack’s Protestantism as a “tissue of damnable errors” whereas Lewis viewed Griffiths’s

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Catholicism as a “mass of comparatively harmless human tradition.”103 The bottom line was that Lewis did not want to continue discussing their differences at all. He preferred to focus on their enormous amount of common ground. This was the characteristic stance Lewis was to take in almost all religious discussion in the future. 1936 In early 1936, Jack was introduced to a new author by his friend, Nevill Coghill. The new author was Charles Williams and the book was The Place of the Lion. Lewis was bowled over by this supernatural thriller and immediately wrote to the author, an editor for the Oxford University Press in London, commending him for his great work. Lewis called his reading of Williams’ book a major literary event, comparable to his first discovery of MacDonald, Chesterton, or Morris. Jack invited Williams to attend one of the sessions of the informal literary club, the Inklings, which had grown out of his meetings with Tolkien. In response, Williams wrote back to Lewis commending him for his new book, The Allegory of Love, on which Williams had been asked to write a review. Furthermore, he said that he would very much like to come to Oxford.104 Thus began a long and very influential relationship in Jack Lewis’s life. In the summer of 1936, writing to his friend Baker, who was suffering from some unknown physical ailments, Jack was to make some comments about human suffering that would later find their way into his book: The Problem of Pain. Jack noted how nothing confirms the Christian view of the role of suffering in life as the witness of patience and unselfishness issuing forth from the lives of common people wracked by trials. Jack told Baker that if this world is a “vale of soul-making” as Keats suggested, then it seems to be working pretty well, at least in some people. At the same time Jack did not want to even guess at why his friend was going through his present suffering.105 1937 In 1937, Jack finished writing Out of the Silent Planet, the first novel in his Cosmic Trilogy, and the novel that emerged from his friendly coin-toss “wager” with Tolkien that one of them would write a science-fiction novel and one a time travel story. Lewis embraced the former, while Tolkien accepted the challenge of the latter. Out of the Silent Planet was later published by John Lane, the Bodley Head on September 23, 1938. In the same year Jack enjoyed reading Charles Williams’s new supernatural thriller: Descent into Hell. Jack later listed this work as one of the ten most influential books he had ever read. Jack spent most of this year increasing his reputation as one of the finest

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Oxford scholars, and continuing to draw the largest crowds of undergraduates to his lectures. 1938 In 1938, Jack was continuing to work on the volume he came to call, acronymically, “O HELL,” his contribution to the Oxford History of English Literature. Jack referred to it as “O HELL” also because it was a hell of a lot of work.106 As a potential war between England and Germany was looming on the horizon Jack wrote to his friend, Dom Bede Griffiths, giving him his Christian perspective on war. He told Griffiths he had always believed it lawful for a Christian to bear arms when commanded to do so by the government, unless that Christian had very good reason for believing the war to be unjust. However, Jack maintained that the private person rarely has good reason for believing a particular war to be unjust. He based his opinion on Jesus’ and John the Baptist’s expressed attitudes toward soldiers, on the opinion of Augustine expressed in The City of God, and the generally favorable opinion of most Christian communities toward the just-war theory.107 Jack later expressed this same view in an essay read to The Oxford Pacifist Society entitled “Why I am not a Pacifist.” That essay is now contained in the book of essays entitled The Weight of Glory. 1939 The year 1939 saw two more of Jack’s books of literary criticism through to publication. On March 23, Rehabilitations and Other Essays, a collection of essays on English literature and the teaching of English language and literature at Oxford, was published by the Oxford University Press. And on April 27, The Personal Heresy with E. M. W. Tillyard, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, was published, also by the OUP. This second book dealt with the question of whether understanding a poet’s biography was important to understanding his or her poetry. Jack had a decidedly negative opinion on this subject that he clung to throughout his entire life. In the summer of 1939, Jack began what would become a long correspondence with an Anglican nun of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin in Wantage, England, not far from Oxford. Her name was Sister Penelope and she wrote to Lewis after reading Out of the Silent Planet.108 Sister Penelope was also an author and a number of her books were influential upon Lewis’s writing. In God Persists, Sister Penelope gave a definition of glory,109 which would eventually impact Lewis’s sermon The Weight of Glory. Her thoughts on Jesus’ recapitulation of the evolutionary process in the womb of the Virgin Mary110

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enhanced Lewis’s understanding of the Incarnation, and theistic evolution, as he expressed both in The Problem of Pain. Sister Penelope’s meditation on the parallel between the dog–human relationship and the human–God relationship inspired Lewis in his treatment of the same subject also in The Problem of Pain.111 And her book entitled Scenes from the Psalms enhanced Lewis’s appreciation of the same,112 eventually leading to his book: Reflections on the Psalms. When Sister Penelope first wrote to C. S. Lewis, Europe was on the brink of war. The peaceful time that Jack and all his friends had known since the end of The Great War was soon to come to an end. Little could Jack have known at that moment how much the Second World War would change his life, and how he would impact the lives of others during that critical time in world history. NOTES 1. The cornerstone of Magdalen tower was laid the same year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue, 1492. 2. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 187–191. 3. Walter Hooper, ed., C. S. Lewis Collected Letters, Volume 1 (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 732. 4. Ibid., 735. 5. Ibid., 701. See also C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1992), 440. 6. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 732. 7. Sayer, Jack, 194. 8. This was in response to a question from The Christian Century. Lewis’s response appeared in the June 6, 1962 edition. 9. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 392–393. 10. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 204–205. 11. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 663. 12. Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 58. 13. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 425. 14. Ibid., 431–432. 15. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 686–693. 16. Ibid., 702–703. 17. Will Vaus, Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 142–143.

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18. See Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 446. 19. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 667. 20. See Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 380, 387, 394, 410. 21. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 714, 716. 22. Ibid., 719. 23. Ibid., 731. 24. Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis, xvi. 25. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 219. 26. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 750. 27. Regulations of the Bodleian Library. 28. “The Lord is my light,” Psalm 27:1. 29. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 751–758. 30. Ibid., 761–765. 31. Ibid., 766–767. 32. Ibid., 777–778. 33. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 211. 34. Ibid., 213. 35. Ibid., 215. 36. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 1, 820. 37. Ibid., 825. 38. Ibid., 827. 39. Ibid., 830. 40. Ibid., 832, 855. 41. Ibid., 833, 853. 42. Ibid., 834, 850. 43. Ibid., 829. 44. Ibid., 916. 45. Ibid., 858, 881, 908. 46. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 221. 47. Dom Bede Griffiths, The Golden String (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1980), 48. 48. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 917–918. 49. Ibid., 942. 50. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 220. 51. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 887–888. For Jack’s account of this walking tour with photos taken many years later by Douglas Gilbert, see Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S Kilby, C. S. Lewis: Images of His World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 118–136. 52. Clyde S Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, ed., Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 35. 53. Ibid., 38–39.

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54. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 896–897. 55. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 940. 56. Ibid., 943. 57. Ibid., 892. 58. Ibid., 948. 59. Ibid., 969–970. 60. Jack was later to spell out in his chapter on “The Perfect Penitent” in Mere Christianity his own theory of how Christ’s death saves us. See C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), 43–47. 61. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 976–977. 62. Ibid., 223. 63. Compare Acts 9:1–19 with Acts 22:3–16 and Acts 26:2–23. 64. Hooper, Collected Letters 1, 970, 974–975. 65. Walter Hooper, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 16. 66. See Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 92–93; and Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 30. 67. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 35. 68. Ibid., 42–43. For an understanding of Lewis’s mature view of the sacraments see Vaus, Mere Theology, 187–196. 69. Ibid., 49. This is the same point which Lewis later made in his essay on “The Efficacy of Prayer,” in C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1987), 3–11. 70. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 53. 71. Ibid., 70–71. 72. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 51. 73. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 71–74. 74. Ibid., 77–79, 84. 75. Ibid., 86–89, 92–93. 76. Ibid., 94–95, 101. 77. Sayer, Jack, 230. 78. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 112. 79. Ibid., 95–96. 80. Ibid., 112. 81. Ibid., 113. 82. Ibid., 115. 83. See Lewis, Mere Christianity, 34–37. 84. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 121–125. 85. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 128–134. 86. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 131–133. 87. Ibid., 135.

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88. See Vaus, Mere Theology, 107–108. 89. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 136. 90. Ibid., 140–142. 91. Ibid., 147, 153. 92. Ibid., 151. 93. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy consists of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. 94. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 630. 95. Ibid., 160. 96. Ibid., 161. 97. Ibid., 162. 98. Ibid., 163–164. 99. Ibid., 167–168. 100. Ibid., 169–170. 101. Taken directly from the jacket of the 1935 Sheed and Ward edition. 102. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 177. 103. Ibid., 178–179. 104. Ibid., 183–184. 105. Ibid., 196. 106. Ibid., 221. 107. Ibid., 233–234. 108. Ibid., 261. 109. Ibid., 263. 110. Ibid., 265. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., 285.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bede-Griffiths, Dom. The Golden String. Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1980. Gibb, Jocelyn, ed. Light on C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, 1976. Gilbert, Douglas and Clyde S. Kilby. C. S. Lewis: Images of His World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977. Kilby, Clyde S. and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Lewis, C. S. All My Road Before Me. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1992. ———. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. ———. The Pilgrim’s Regress. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958. ———. Surprised by Joy. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955. ———. The World’s Last Night. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1987.

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Hooper, Walter, ed. C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume 1. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume 2. London: HarperCollins, 2004. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994. Vaus, Will. Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004.

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Lewis in Oxford: The Later Tutorial Years (1939–1953) Will Vaus

1939 On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and Warren “Warnie” Lewis, being in the Army Reserve, was called back into service, eventually being posted to Le Havre. The next day, four school girls from London were evacuated to The Kilns, part of a massive evacuation of children from London in anticipation of German bombing.1 C. S. “Jack” Lewis later used the evacuation of children from London as part of the plot of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. On September 3, England declared war on Germany. One profoundly negative effect of wartime economizing at Oxford University was that Jack lost his stipend for university lectureship.2 As a result Jack had to return to grading School Certificate examinations to bring a little extra money into his household.3 However, one unanticipated good result of the bombing of London was that on September 7, Jack’s friend Charles Williams moved to Oxford from London with the Oxford University Press. Thus Jack got to spend time with Williams every week and the latter became a regular participant in the meetings of the Inklings. Jack gave a wonderful description of one of those meetings in a letter to his brother on November 11. Dinner at the Eastgate Hotel was followed by readings in Jack’s rooms at Magdalen, which included bits of what would become Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy,

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a nativity play from Williams, and a chapter out of Jack’s Problem of Pain. It must have been quite a literary feast indeed! On October 22, 1939, C. S. Lewis preached his first sermon at St Mary the Virgin, the University Church in Oxford. The sermon was published in a pamphlet by the Student Christian Movement under the title, The Christian in Danger. Subsequently, the publisher Ashley Sampson, who had also invited Lewis to contribute The Problem of Pain to the Christian Challenge series of books he was bringing out, now asked Jack if he could include his sermon in an anthology he was editing entitled: Famous English Sermons. Jack wrote to Warnie saying that he couldn’t make up his mind whether he should be grateful for the honor or fearful of looking a fool if his sermon should appear alongside the work of such historical figures as Bede, Latimer and Donne.4 When Jack later included this sermon in Transposition and Other Addresses he changed the title to Learning in War-Time.5 Starting in the autumn of 1939, Jack began to meet weekly with Adam Fox, Chaplain of Magdalen, and a group of Christian undergraduates. He found the group to be largely ignorant of theology and so tried to fill in some gaps for them. It was either with this group or another group of undergraduates that Jack shared his work in progress on The Problem of Pain. According to Arthur Lewis, an Oxford undergraduate unrelated to C. S. Lewis who participated in this group, C. S. Lewis would read out to the students a chapter of his book each week and “pick their brains” about it. He wanted to be sure that his book, when published, made sense, at least to college students. Arthur Lewis noted that, unlike the portrayal in the movie Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis did not put himself in “safe” positions, at least during the early years of his work as a fellow, tutor, and lecturer. As far as his lectures were concerned, Arthur Lewis felt that C. S. Lewis was the best lecturer at Oxford at that time in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He developed a style of lecturing that was very attractive to students. Jack would invite students to listen to what he had to say without taking notes. Then he would stop and dictate something specific for students to write down. Then he would invite his audience to simply listen again without taking notes. This was the style Lewis used in his lectures on Prolegomena to Renaissance Literature and his lectures on Paradise Lost. Jack was conscientious about time management in the delivery of lectures. He would begin lecturing while still walking into the hall, then borrow a watch from a student in the front row, so as to time himself. One of those students was Roger Lancelyn Green, later Jack’s friend and biographer. When Jack was nearing the end of his lecture he would gather up his papers, hand the borrowed watch back to the student, and finish the lecture just as he strode out the back door!

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One humorous incident related by Arthur Lewis concerned the time when he saw C. S. Lewis in a queue for tickets at the train station in Oxford. Jack reported to the ticket sales clerk that he had lost his train ticket and needed a replacement. He had no proof of purchase but the clerk trusted him nonetheless and gave him a replacement ticket. Then Jack handed the ticket to the clerk and asked for his money back . . . and got it! C. S. Lewis was apparently a persuasive communicator, not only in his teaching, but in everyday life.6 1940 In 1940, Jack carried on a debate in print with George Every, S. L. Bethell, and Jack’s former tutor, E. F. Carritt, on the subject of Christianity and Culture.7 Lewis’s point in the debate was that culture can potentially be a storehouse for the best sub-Christian values. For some people this can be a road into Christian faith, for others it may be a road out. During Hilary Term of 1940, Jack’s friend Charles Williams gave a series of lectures on Milton delivered in one of the most beautiful rooms in Oxford, the Divinity School with its lovely fan vaulting. Lewis related with enthusiasm to many of his friends the result of Williams’s lecture on Comus which, in reality focused on the virtues of chastity. Jack thought it was a beautiful sight to see a university finally being used for its original purpose: teaching wisdom. Furthermore, he contemplated that no more important event had taken place in the Divinity School since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures.8 Williams’s lectures had the important effect of causing Jack to reread Paradise Lost, making detailed notes.9 This eventually led to Jack’s own Ballard Matthews Lectures at University College, North Wales in 1941, later revised and enlarged in book form with the title: A Preface to Paradise Lost, dedicated to Williams and published in 1942.10 In many of Jack’s letters at this time he began to discuss with various correspondents different issues of Christian doctrine and practice that would later find their way into his own public addresses, essays and books. In a letter to his brother written on March 3, 1940, Jack queried: how does one, in prayer, combine the attitude of saying “thy will be done” while at the same time asking with the attitude of believing that you will receive? Jack put this same problem before the Oxford Clerical Society on December 8, 1953, in an address entitled: Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer.11 Eventually Jack came up with his own answer, articulated in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.12 In his correspondence with a former student, Mary Neylan, Jack also discussed subjects that would later appear in his books. In a letter written on

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March 26, 1940, he answered her question about whether a Christian should be a psychoanalyst.13 Jack eventually put his thoughts on this subject into a whole chapter in Mere Christianity.14 And in a letter written on April 18 he shared his thoughts on being in love, sex, marriage, headship, and subordination. These ideas eventually appeared in Mere Christianity15 and The Four Loves.16 However, it was in a letter to his brother, begun on July 20, 1940, that Jack recorded an idea for a book that would make him famous. The idea came to him during a Sunday service at his local parish church during which an apparently boring sermon was preached. Before the service was over Jack conceived of writing a collection of letters from a senior to a junior devil instructing him on the appropriate methods of tempting his “patient.” These letters were eventually published in The Guardian, a Church of England newspaper, between May and November 1941.17 Canon John Fenton was once asked if he had ever met C. S. Lewis when he was a student at Oxford in the early 1940s. He said that he had. At the time he had been collecting Lewis’s devilish letters from The Guardian. He asked Lewis how many there were to be in the end. Lewis’s reply was: “Thirty-one, something diabolical for each day of the month.”18 These thirty-one diabolical epistles were eventually published as The Screwtape Letters.19 Jack sent a copy of the manuscript to one of his correspondents, Sister Penelope, asking her to keep it safe until publication, in case the copy with the publisher in London got blitzed!20 This manuscript now resides in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. The Screwtape Letters sold well from the very beginning. It was published by Geoffrey Bles in February 1942 and the first two thousand copies, one of which I have in my library, sold out before publication. The book was reprinted eight times in 1942. Since then it has been translated into numerous languages and has sold in the millions of copies worldwide.21 During the week of March 13, 2006, The Screwtape Letters was #6 on the Publishers Weekly Religion Paperback Bestsellers List; Mere Christianity was #3. Jack was initially paid £2 per letter by The Guardian. He instructed that the money be sent to a list of widows and orphans. He later made a similar arrangement for disposal of income from his BBC radio talks. It never occurred to Jack that he would have to pay tax on this income. When he received a very large tax bill, his friend and solicitor, Owen Barfield, helped him to set up a charitable trust into which two-thirds of his income was thereafter directed.22 Jack referred to this fund as the Agapony in a letter to Barfield written on August 20, 1942.23 In August 1940, Warnie was transferred to the Reserve of Officers and began serving with the 6th Oxford City Home Guard Battalion. During the summer months he offered his “floating” service from his boat, the Bosphorus,

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which he cruised along the rivers of Oxfordshire.24 At the same time Jack was serving as a Local Defense Volunteer. In this capacity he spent the wee hours of every Saturday morning toting a heavy rifle around Oxford, often with other men who were also serving in the Local Defense.25 Now that Warnie was back home and living at The Kilns, when he wasn’t on his own boat, he was able to help Jack with his increasing correspondence. Jack payed Warnie a small salary to handle routine correspondence, type lectures, and other short pieces; Warnie performed this service all with two fingers by the “hunt and peck” method. He answered many of the letters without bothering his brother, except for a signature.26 The letters written by Warnie had a different flavor from Jack’s.27 (Warnie’s letters were much more newsy–mentioning weather, politics, and other everyday activities, such as this one written to Mrs. Edna Watson on January 2, 1952: “Very many thanks for your kind present of the cake, which has just arrived in good condition; good external condition that is, for it will not be opened until I get it out to my house this evening, where it will be received with much enthusiasm. I often hear laments about the difficulty of getting cake making materials, so you can imagine how much pleasure it will give.”)28 On October 24, 1940, Jack wrote to Sister Penelope informing her of a momentous decision in his life. The following week he made his first confession.29 Eleven days later he wrote to Sister Penelope again, saying that he had come through all right.30 Jack’s confessor was Father Walter Adams, a member of the Society of St John the Evangelist in Cowley, a suburb of Oxford. Jack went to confession weekly, until Father Adams’ death in 1952.31 1941 On February 7, 1941, Dr. James W. Welch, Director of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC, wrote to C. S. Lewis asking him if he would be willing to help them in their task of religious broadcasting. Welch had been very impressed with Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. Jack immediately wrote back accepting the invitation and suggesting a series of talks on objective right and wrong. Next, Jack heard from Eric Fenn, Dr. Welch’s assistant, suggesting a series of four Wednesday evening talks in August or September 1941.32 Jack eventually gave the four talks in August. This led to a further series of talks in January and February 1942 on the topic: What Christians Believe. Jack asked four people from different Christian communions for critique of this second series of broadcast talks, prior to delivery, to see if there was any disagreement among them. He wanted to insure that what he was saying represented mere Christianity as much as possible.33 These two series of talks were published in July 1942 under the simple title: Broadcast Talks.34 In September and November of 1942, Jack gave yet another series of BBC talks, this time

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on the topic: Christian Behavior.35 These were published in 1943 under the same title. Then from February to April 1944, Jack gave his final series of BBC talks on Christianity. This series was published in October 1944 under the title: Beyond Personality.36 Most of these talks were delivered live; in fact, only one recording of Jack’s BBC talks on Christianity still survives, on the topic of The New Men. It has been said that these war time talks over BBC radio made C. S. Lewis’s voice the most recognizable in all of Britain during the war, second only to Winston Churchill. All of these talks were eventually revised, amplified, and collected in the one volume entitled Mere Christianity, published in 1952.37 Jack’s other great war time work was that of lecturing on Christianity at Royal Air Force bases across Britain. This work was instigated by the Dean of St Paul’s, the Very Rev. Walter Robert Matthews, who wrote to the Chaplainin-Chief of the RAF, the Rev. Maurice Edwards, suggesting a lectureship in his patronage with C. S. Lewis as the man for the job. Edwards wrote to Jack about this and soon after met with him to arrange the details. The first of these lectures was given at the RAF base at Abingdon in April 1941.38 In May, Jack wrote to Sister Penelope confessing his feeling that these first talks were a complete failure. Yet, he said, one must take comfort in the fact that God once used an ass to convert the prophet Balaam.39 Charles Gilmore, Maurice Edwards’s assistant, had a different evaluation of Jack’s effect on the RAF men and women. According to him, as a result of hearing Lewis, there were handfuls of young people gaining new ideas of how they fit into the life immediately before them. Jack later lectured to the RAF Chaplains School. His first topic was ill-chosen: Linguistic Analysis in Pauline Soteriology! But in the midst of the lecture Jack suddenly said something about prostitutes and pawnbrokers being forgiven in heaven, the first by the throne. That caught everyone’s attention and then the rest of the talk went along swimmingly. After that, linguistic analysis was left in the dust.40 Jack’s talks apparently became rather popular at the RAF bases because, as he later wrote to Arthur Greeves, by the autumn of 1941 he was hardly ever at home for more than three consecutive nights. The rest of the time he was traveling and speaking, making the map of his “missionary journeys” more complicated than that of the Apostle Paul!41 On Sunday evening, June 8, Jack preached his most famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” in St. Mary’s, the University Church, in Oxford. What was the response to Jack’s sermons? Fred Paxford, Jack’s gardener on whom Jack later modeled the character of Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, once wrote: Mr. Jack should have been a clergyman. He would have made a great parson. When he preached at Quarry Church, it was always packed. He had a full clear voice which

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could be heard all over the church; and he nearly always brought a bit of humor into the sermons; and people seemed to like this. On a few occasions I had to drive him in to Oxford to preach in St. Mary’s. As he always liked to be early, I parked the car and went to the service, and the church was always packed.42

In the autumn of 1941, Jack was also working on a new book, the second in his Cosmic Trilogy, eventually to be titled: Perelandra. He wrote to Sister Penelope on November 9 saying that he had got his main character, Ransom, to Venus and through the first dialogue with the Eve of that planet.43 The book was published on April 20, 1943, by John Lane, the Bodley Head of London.44 It was dedicated “To some ladies at Wantage,” that is, Sister Penelope’s fellow nuns, whom Jack had met in the spring of 1941. The dedication was later misunderstood by a translator of the book, and so became, in Portuguese: “To some wanton ladies”!45 All in all, 1941 was a very busy year for C. S. Lewis. In addition to his BBC talks, his lectures to the RAF, and his writing, Jack was temporarily made Vice President of Magdalen College. To add insult to injury the President of Magdalen took sick and Jack had to do his work as well. Office work was not Jack’s forte, but with the help of a secretary in college he got all the extra work accomplished.46 1942 On January 26, 1942, the first meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club took place at Somerville College. This was a club formed for debates on Christian topics between Christian and non-Christian scholars. Jack was asked to be President by Stella Aldwinckle, the student who formed the club. He served as President until 1954, often delivering papers himself, or responding to those who did. In 1942, Lewis addressed such topics as: Is God a Wish Fulfillment?” and “Skepticism and Faith.”47 The University of Durham asked Jack to deliver the three Riddell Memorial Lectures for 1943. In preparation Jack immersed himself in the thirteenvolume Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics edited by James Hastings. The end product was not only the Riddell Memorial Lectures, but also a book entitled The Abolition of Man, published by the Oxford University Press on January 6, 1943. This volume contains Jack’s reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English at the high school level in England. More broadly, The Abolition of Man is about objective values and morality, as Jack demonstrates, especially in the appendix to this book. His key theme, how all the great civilizations in world history have been in agreement in regard to their basic moral teaching, though they have disagreed on certain

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minor points, has been a hallmark of many discussions of the decline of Western Civilization since. 1943 On February 2, 1943, Jack was invited to give yet another series of lectures at another university, this time at Trinity College, Cambridge. Jack was invited to give The Clark Lectures in April and May of 1944, and these formed the nucleus of what would become English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.48 In May of 1943, Jack wrote to fellow author, Dorothy Sayers, who had begun a correspondence with him, informing her that he was starting a book on Miracles. He enclosed a copy of a sermon on the same subject. Jack was to work on this book over the course of the next two years. Sayers’s observation regarding the lack of literature on this subject was, perhaps, what prompted Jack to write Miracles.49 In return, Sayers sent Lewis a copy of her book of plays on the life of Jesus: The Man Born to be King. Jack and Warnie both enjoyed these plays a great deal over the years.50 Jack’s work on Miracles caused him to be very much occupied with the theme of new creation. He felt the church had neglected the doctrines of the resurrection of the body and the resurrection of all creation. At the same time, his work on the topic of miracles caused Jack to appreciate God’s old creation more than ever before.51 The book was finally published in May 1947.52 Also during the year 1943, Jack wrote the final book in his Cosmic Trilogy: That Hideous Strength. In December he wrote to Arthur saying that he had finished writing the story and that he was thinking of dedicating it to their friend Janie McNeil.53 That Hideous Strength serves as a sort of illustration of and companion volume to The Abolition of Man. Perhaps out of all of Jack’s books it most shows the influence of Charles Williams. It was published by John Lane, the Bodley Head in August 1945. 1944 In 1944, Jack embarked on writing yet another theological fantasy that was initially titled Who Goes Home? and later re-titled The Great Divorce.54 This book contains a fanciful story of a bus ride between hell and heaven, a round-trip for some but not for others. In reality, Jack simply used the idea of the “Refrigerium”55 as an excuse to talk about the choices we make in this life and how those choices frame our eternal destiny. He also openly acknowledged the connection between Dante’s Divine Comedy and his own book.56 On November 10, 1944, the first installment of The Great Divorce appeared in The Guardian. It was published in book form by Geoffrey Bles in January 1946.57

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1945 Of course the biggest world event of 1945 was the end of the Second World War on May 8. But the biggest event of Jack’s personal life in 1945 took place just a few days later, on May 15. It was a Tuesday morning, just before the Inklings were to meet at The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. Having heard that Charles Williams had been taken ill and was in the Radcliffe Infirmary, Jack went to visit him. He went with a book in hand that he wanted to lend to Williams and expected to take messages from Williams back to the other members of the Inklings. Nothing could have surprised Jack more than to learn that Charles Williams had died in hospital. He even had difficulty making the other Inklings believe this was the case. Jack later wrote that this loss was the greatest he had ever known in his life up to that time. Quite a statement, that! A greater loss than that of his father or his mother? Amazing. Yet so it seemed to Jack at that time. Still, Williams’ particular and striking absence in body translated to a presence in spirit that Jack found remarkable. He said that nothing more greatly corroborated his belief in the next life than Williams’ death.58 Prior to the death of Charles Williams, Jack and Tolkien had been discussing the idea of putting together a collection of essays to honor Williams prior to his return to London with the Oxford University Press. What was planned as a festschrift soon became a memorial volume to be sold for the benefit of Williams’s widow.59 Jack invited Tolkien, Sayers, Barfield, Gervase Mathew, his brother Warnie, and T. S. Eliot to contribute essays to the volume. Eliot was the only one in the end who did not contribute an essay. This book was published by the Oxford University Press in 1947 under the title: Essays Presented to Charles Williams. In addition to this collection of essays Jack immediately planned to give a series of lectures on Williams’s poetry and to follow that up with a book on the same subject.60 The book, Arthurian Torso, was published by the Oxford University Press in 194861 and the royalties went to Michal Williams, Charles Williams’s widow. At the end of 1948, Lewis was asked by the BBC if he would give a talk over the radio about the novels of Charles Williams62 and this he eventually did. Jack did everything in his power to get others to read Williams’s work. Around the same time as Williams’s death Jack finished putting together a collection of selected readings from his literary mentor George MacDonald. He dedicated the volume to his former student, Mary Neylan, whom he had led to faith in Christ and who also greatly enjoyed MacDonald.63 The book was published by Geoffrey Bles in 1946 and is still in print.64 In his preface to this book Jack gives an admirable summary of MacDonald’s life as well as describing the impact of MacDonald’s writings on his own life.

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Once World War II was over the Inklings planned to have a victory celebration. This took the form of a walking tour. But in the end only four of the Inklings were able to participate: Jack, Warnie, Tolkien, and their doctor, Robert “Humphrey” Havard. They spent December 11–14 staying at the Bull Hotel in Fairford, Gloucestershire, going out for extended walks each day.65 It was a fitting conclusion for the Inklings to what had been a momentous year in their mutual lives. 1946 On June 28, 1946, Warnie accompanied Jack on a trip to St Andrews, Scotland. There Jack was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree by St Mary’s College of the University of St Andrews, the third oldest university in the United Kingdom, after Oxford and Cambridge. Writing to Jill Flewett, a former Kilns evacuee, about this event, Jack said a case of Scotch whiskey might have been a kinder compliment. But he was pleased with the honorary degree nonetheless.66 Jack and Warnie enjoyed the scenery of St Andrews far more than the degree ceremony itself. As Jack later wrote to his godson, Laurence Harwood, the most interesting thing about the trip was the place itself–the town next to the sea with the waves breaking just underneath the windows of some of the colleges, the ruins of a castle and a cathedral, plus miles and miles of sand.67 In July 1946, Jack began a correspondence with the poet, Ruth Pitter, who wrote to tell him how much his work had meant to her; she became a Christian through listening to Jack’s broadcast talks on the BBC.68 Pitter asked if she might meet Lewis and the latter invited her to meet him in his rooms at Magdalen College.69 This meeting led to a lively correspondence along with a sharing and critiquing of one another’s poems. Pitter was one of the very few modern poets whose work Jack appreciated. The two met together on a number of occasions and Jack once commented to his friend and former pupil, George Sayer, that if he was not a confirmed old bachelor Ruth Pitter would be the woman he would like to marry.70 1947 Of course the main thing that kept Jack from marrying Pitter, or anyone else for that matter, was the presence in his life of Mrs Moore. As her health, both physically and mentally, deteriorated throughout the 1940s, Jack was less and less able to get away from The Kilns, even for a day at a time. His letters reflect the numerous times he had to say no to various speaking and other engagements. The one bright spot in all of this domestic hell was that

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Maureen Moore, now married to the music teacher Leonard Blake, would come with her husband from Great Malvern occasionally to relieve Jack of his nursing duties. At the same time, Jack and Warnie would go to Malvern on holiday. In 1947 that holiday took place April 4–17. Jack and Warnie enjoyed the Easter Communion Service at Malvern Priory, the discovery of the Unicorn Pub opposite the Foley Arms Hotel, and hiking the Malvern Hills. Hugo Dyson even showed up on this vacation and joined in on one of the Lewis brothers’ favorite walks—to the British Camp, where one has a grand view eastward of the Cotswolds and westward toward Wales.71 Several weeks after the Lewis brothers returned to The Kilns, Warnie was off again, this time to Ireland. Unfortunately, Warnie fell into one of his alcoholic binges, a problem that had cropped up for him during his time in military service. On this occasion Warnie landed in the Convent Hospital of Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda. The doctor was so concerned about Warnie’s condition that the hospital wired Jack to come over from England.72 The silver lining in this cloud was that Jack got an Irish holiday out of the deal and was able to visit Arthur Greeves whom he had not seen in quite some time.73 However, the cloud of Warnie’s alcoholism did not dissipate. It was another domestic trouble with which Jack was to contend for the rest of his life. In August the Lewis brothers returned to Malvern, this time with Tolkien in tow. They were joined by George Sayer, one of Jack’s former pupils who, after Oxford, taught English and served as the librarian at Malvern College. Tolkien didn’t quite fit in with Jack and Warnie’s walking preferences. Tollers, as they called him, would want to stop and talk or pause to observe the flora and fauna in greater depth. For his part, Tollers called the Lewis brothers “ruthless walkers”!74 On September 6, 1947, Jack began an unusual correspondence with a Roman Catholic priest in Verona, Italy by the name of Don Giovanni Calabria. Calabria was the founder of an orphanage and of the Congregation of the Poor Servants of Divine Providence. The Lewis-Calabria correspondence was unusual because it was all in Latin. Twenty-seven letters out of their correspondence are extant from 1947 to Calabria’s death in 1954. Thereafter Lewis continued corresponding with another member of the Congregation, Don Luigi Pedrollo. Seven of Lewis’s Latin letters to Pedrollo are extant. This remarkable correspondence was subsequently edited and published by one of Lewis’s former students, Martin Moynihan. On September 8, 1947, Lewis’s picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Jack’s face was flanked by angel wings on one side and a devil with pitchfork on the other. The caption read: “OXFORD’S C. S. LEWIS: His heresy: Christianity.” The article inside was entitled, “Don vs. Devil” and noted that Lewis, by that time, had sold over a million copies of his fifteen

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books and that his twenty-nine BBC broadcast talks had gone out to an average of 600,000 listeners each time. Time explored Lewis’s life story and theological views in some depth. The article also noted that outside his own particular Christian circle Lewis was not well liked by his Oxford colleagues, who resented an English don writing on Christian subjects. What was Jack’s attitude toward appearing on the cover of Time? It confirmed his dislike of answering biographical questions about his own life!75 1948 On February 2, 1948, an event took place that some say changed the course of Jack’s career as a Christian writer. On that date Elizabeth Anscombe, philosophy tutor at Somerville College, Oxford, gave a “Reply” to Jack’s book Miracles at the Socratic Club. In the third chapter of that book Jack had argued that there was a self-contradiction in Naturalism, the belief that this physical world is all there is. Jack wrote: . . . every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissable, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs . . . But Naturalism, as commonly held, is precisely a theory of this sort.76

Anscombe objected to another particular statement by Lewis: “We may in fact state it as a rule that no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.”77 Anscombe insisted that a distinction must be made between irrational causes and non-rational causes. Second, she asked Lewis to clarify what he meant by valid reasoning. Thirdly, she maintained that the Naturalist could explain a chain of reasoning as the result of non-rational causes, leaving valid reasoning in tact. Finally, she sought to distinguish between the ground of a conclusion and the cause of a conclusion. Lewis admitted in debate that the ground of a conclusion and the cause of a conclusion were far from synonymous. Furthermore he confessed that his use of the word valid was unfortunate.78 George Sayer, writing of this event in his biography of Lewis, says that Jack told him his argument for the existence of God had been demolished and that he could never write another book like Miracles.79 However, Jack thought deeply about Anscombe’s criticisms and ended up re-writing the third chapter of Miracles for the 1960 edition of the book.80 Anscombe’s recollection of the debate was that it was a “. . . sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis’s rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate.”81 For whatever reason, by the summer of 1948, Jack had begun writing a type of book completely different from Miracles. The American writer, Chad

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Walsh, visited Jack that summer in order to interview him for a book he was writing about Jack’s life and work.82 Based upon that interview Walsh wrote that Jack talked vaguely of completing a children’s book that he had begun in the tradition of E. Nesbit.83 This was, apparently, the continuation of a story he had begun writing in 1939 when child evacuees from London had come to live at The Kilns.84 1949 On March 10, 1949, Roger Lancelyn Green, one of Jack’s former students, dined with him at Magdalen. Afterwards Jack read to Green two chapters from a story for children that he was writing. He had already read the story to Tolkien who didn’t care for it at all. He asked Green if he thought the story any good. Green assured him it was very good. Jack had the complete story ready for Green to read by the end of the month.85 This wonderful children’s story was titled: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and was published on October 16, 1950, by Geoffrey Bles. It was dedicated to Lucy Barfield, Owen and Maud Barfield’s adopted daughter and Jack’s goddaughter. It was Maud Barfield’s concern about children getting trapped in a wardrobe that led to Jack’s frequent warnings against this in the book.86 The person eventually selected to illustrate all the Narnia stories was Pauline Baynes, who had also done the drawings for Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham. Jack saw her illustrations for The Lion in early December 1949 and met her for the first time on December 31.87 What inspired Jack Lewis to write a story for children that eventually led to a whole series: The Chronicles of Narnia ? As with most of his fiction, The Lion began with a picture in Jack’s mind, in this case a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. He had this picture in his mind from the time he was sixteen, then finally, when he was about forty, he decided to make a story out of it. At first he had very little idea of how the story would progress, but then the great lion Aslan came bounding into it. Jack suffered from nightmares throughout his entire life, and around that time he was having a number of dreams with a lion in them. Once Aslan came on the scene he pulled six other stories in with him.88 One of the amazing things about the production of the Narnia stories is that Lewis began writing them at a time when he thought his own zeal and talent for writing was decreasing!89 While 1949 was a good year for the children of the world, in that it saw C. S. Lewis finishing the first of the Narnia tales, it was a bad year for Jack’s health. In June, Warnie returned from a weekend away at Malvern only to find Jack being shipped off to the Acland Nursing Home in an ambulance. Jack’s illness was diagnosed as strep throat that was treated with injections of

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penicillin every three hours around the clock. Once Jack was on the mend in the hospital, his doctor, Humphrey Havard recommended a good, long holiday away from The Kilns. As a result Jack planned to take a month-long holiday in Ireland starting in July.90 Unfortunately, by the end of June, Warnie was on an alcoholic binge once again, and Jack’s longed-for trip to Ireland had to be cancelled.91 Once Warnie recovered and was teetotal again, all Jack could manage was a few brief jaunts away from The Kilns throughout the summer.92 During the summer of 1949, Jack was at work on a sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. However, the story of Digory, which eventually became The Magician’s Nephew, didn’t come together in the right way at first, and so Jack set it aside. In his conversation with Roger Lancelyn Green about this story, Jack also mentioned his interest in the idea of people being summoned, or pulled by magic, into another world. By September this idea flowered into the story that would become Prince Caspian.93 By the end of 1949 the manuscript of this story was complete and sent off to Green for his critique.94 By the end of 1949 two of Jack’s friends had also completed two very important books. In October Jack was reading the typescript of Tolkien’s complete Lord of the Rings trilogy and giving Tollers his comments once again.95 And in November Dorothy Sayers sent Jack her translation of Dante’s Inferno, published by Penguin.96 He thought the work of both these friends to be great successes. 1950 On January 10, 1950, an event occurred that would have far-reaching implications for Jack’s life. He received a letter from Mrs. Joy Gresham of Staatsburg, New York. In a sense, Mrs. Gresham was just one more of Lewis’s American female correspondents. But in another sense, as Warnie later noted in his diary, she stood out from the rest because her letters were, at the same time, amusing and well written.97 Joy was a pen-friend of Chad Walsh who had published his C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics the year before, and she herself had come to faith in Christ, partly through reading Lewis’s books. Mrs. Gresham enjoyed, from the first, having the philosophical props knocked out from under her as she sought to debate with Lewis by letter.98 Soon a friendship by mail grew between Jack and Joy. Just as Jack was gaining one important female relationship, he was losing another. On April 29, Mrs. Moore fell out of bed three times and was subsequently moved to Restholme, a nursing home on the Woodstock Road in Oxford. This event was greeted with “very strong language” from Mrs. Moore herself, who queried how soon she would be let out of her imprisonment.

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Either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective, the doctor at Restholme informed Jack that Mrs. Moore would probably have to stay in the nursing home for the rest of her life. To make matters worse, the woman was rapidly losing her mind. When Warnie visited her in June she handed him a letter informing him that Maureen had been killed; however, the correspondence said nothing of the kind.99 Despite the many demands on his time, Jack remained faithful to the promise he had made to Paddy Moore 33 years before; he visited Mrs. Moore every day in the nursing home. Mrs. Moore’s absence apparently had a profound effect on the atmosphere of The Kilns. Warnie was now able to move into Maureen’s former bedroom upstairs where he could be free of the drafts in the winter and the mosquitoes in summer.100 Jack found domestic life more physically comfortable and psychologically harmonious due to Mrs. Moore’s departure.101 However, Jack was also worried about how he was going to continue paying £500 per year for Mrs. Moore to be in the nursing home, should she still be there in nine more years when he would be compulsorily retired from Oxford University.102 1951 In the event, Jack needn’t have worried. Mrs. Janie King Moore died of influenza on January 12, 1951. She was buried in Holy Trinity Churchyard on January 15.103 And Jack was finally free of a burden he had carried for over 30 years. One of the most amazing things about this period in Jack’s life is that, as he was completing the arduous crawl to the finish line with Mrs. Moore, he was also writing the books for which he will be most remembered. Most of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written during March and April of 1949. By February 1950 he had completed Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And by the end of 1950 he had written The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy, while also making another start on The Magician’s Nephew. Jack wrote The Last Battle in 1952 and The Chronicles of Narnia were released, one each year, starting in 1950.104 At first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe didn’t sell very well. Apparently some parents and teachers were steering children away from the book, thinking it might be too scary for them. Still, Jack was gratified to learn how the children who did read the book enjoyed it.105 And of course in the end the Narnia tales became Jack’s most popular books, selling over 100 million copies. In the early part of 1951, Jack was put on the ballot for the Professor of Poetry of Oxford University. Every five years a new person is elected to this position by all the Masters degree holders of Oxford. Jack was up against two other practicing poets, Edmund Blunden and C. Day Lewis. Many at Oxford felt Jack should not be the Professor of Poetry because they looked on

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him as a critic and not a practicing poet, being unaware of his contributions to Punch under the pseudonym of “N. W.” Blunden subsequently dropped out of the race so that C. Day Lewis would garner all his votes, as well as the Atheist-Communist bloc. One elector said he would vote for C. Day Lewis simply because C. S. Lewis had written The Screwtape Letters.106 On the day of the election a student overheard two dons discussing the matter as they walked along the Oxford High Street. “Shall we go and cast our votes against C. S. Lewis?”107 In the end Jack lost by 173 to 194 votes. His friends and supporters were more crushed than he was. The election revealed the antipathy of a number of the Oxford faculty toward C. S. Lewis. Apparently much of this hatred centered around Jack’s expression of Christian faith. It wasn’t so much the simple fact that Jack was a Christian; that wasn’t what perturbed the hard-boiled atheists at Oxford. It was the fact that Jack wrote popular books about Christianity. Here he was an English don writing outside of his discipline and selling lots of books to boot. Being newly released from his bondage to Mrs. Moore, Jack planned for a holiday with Arthur Greeves, arriving in Northern Ireland on March 31 and departing on April 16. Jack stayed at The Old Inn, Crawfordsburn, just a stone’s throw away from Arthur’s new home, Silver Hill, in the same County Down village. In anticipation of the holiday, Jack wrote to Arthur saying that he now knew how a bottle of champagne would feel while the wire was being taken off the cork. Once he was back home in Oxford, Jack again wrote to Arthur saying that their holiday together had been one of the happiest times in his life.108 Yet, Jack was wary of the good time he was experiencing. He wrote to Sister Penelope in June asking for her prayers because he was, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, traveling across “a plain called Ease.” In the same letter Jack mentioned that during the previous month he had come to really believe in God’s forgiveness.109 To what may we attribute Jack’s fresh sense of God’s forgiveness? Biographer A. N. Wilson attributes it to the death of Mrs. Moore. Jack himself attributed this new stage of spiritual growth to the prayers of one of his correspondents, Don Calabria. Whatever the reason, Jack was experiencing a new lease on life.110 From August 14 to 28, Jack and Warnie went on holiday together to Ireland. They stayed for a fortnight in a bungalow that none of the local people would approach because they thought the area was haunted by “the good people.” Apparently there was a ghost there as well, but the Irish peasants didn’t mind him as much as the faeries. After this time with Warnie, Jack spent another fortnight with Arthur Greeves, again in Crawfordsburn.111 Beginning with the Michaelmas Term of 1951, Jack was given a year off from his teaching duties at Magdalen in order to complete work on English

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Literature in the Sixteenth Century, volume III of the Oxford History of English Literature (O. H. E. L.). The academic year was one of very hard work but by June of 1952 the job was complete, and the “O Hell!,” as Jack referred to it, was off his plate.112 Toward the end of 1951, Jack was given yet another honor. He was offered the Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Jack wrote to the Prime Minister’s secretary on December 3 politely refusing the honor. He was afraid the appearance of his name on the Honors List would strengthen the hands of those who said that his religious writings were merely covert anti-Leftist propaganda.113 1952 In 1952 further developments were afoot in Jack’s personal life. On September 24, 1952, he had lunch with Joy Gresham and her friend Phyllis Williams at the Eastgate Hotel across the High Street from Magdalen College in Oxford. Joy had come to England for several reasons. Her marriage with Bill Gresham was falling apart. She had a recent bout with jaundice and her physician encouraged her to go away for a time of rest. She needed quiet time to herself to complete work on her book, Smoke on the Mountain,114 and get it ready for the publisher. And she wanted to meet her spiritual mentor, C. S. Lewis.115 Joy’s cousin, Ren´ee Pierce, was staying with the Greshams and so was able to take care of Joy’s sons, David and Douglas, in her absence. Apparently the luncheon on the 24th of September was a success because Jack, in turn, invited Joy and Phyllis to dine with him and his brother in his rooms in Magdalen. Warnie withdrew at the last minute and so Jack invited George Sayer to take his place. Though some at Oxford were later put off by Joy’s New York brashness, Jack was delighted with her bluntness, her wit and her anti-American attitudes.116 Jack invited Joy back again for lunch at Magdalen and this time Warnie joined them along with some of Jack’s colleagues.117 Warnie wasn’t sure what to make of Joy at first. During their first luncheon together Joy turned to Warnie and asked, “Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself ?”118 Despite his early trepidations Warnie grew to love Joy and greatly relish her company. Apparently nothing about Joy’s behavior disturbed Jack, for he invited her to spend the Christmas holiday with him and Warnie at The Kilns. Joy joined the Lewis brothers for Christmas turkey, long walks, as well as jaunts to their favorite pubs. During the visit Joy read galley proofs of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century that Jack was working on correcting. She in turn shared Smoke on the Mountain with him and he gave suggestions for improvement.

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At the same time, Jack was working on a book on prayer and finishing up the seventh Narnia book. On Christmas Day, Jack gave Joy his copy of MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul signed by MacDonald himself, and Joy, in turn, made a present of Smoke on the Mountain to Jack by dedicating the book to him.119 1953 A few days before Joy sailed for home on January 3, 1953, she received a four-page, single-spaced letter from her husband Bill, informing her that he was in love with her cousin Ren´ee and that he wanted a divorce. Joy told Jack about Bill’s alcoholism and his many infidelities and then showed him the letter. Jack advised that Joy should grant Bill the divorce.120 On that note Joy left England for the United States. Upon arriving back in Staatsburg, New York, Joy found that Bill was drinking again. On top of that he knocked her about a bit. Though she was against the basic idea of divorce, she gave in to Bill’s request. However, the divorce could not take place right away; the Greshams did not have enough money to hire a lawyer. Still, Joy made plans to take her boys with her and move to England. Her stated reason was that it would be cheaper to live in England on what Bill could afford to give her. But certainly her closest friends knew that the real attraction in England was C. S. Lewis.121 David, Douglas, and Joy Gresham set sail for England in November 1953. Douglas celebrated his eighth birthday on board ship. Joy rented a flat in London near her friend Phyllis Williams and enrolled her boys in Dane Court preparatory school in Surrey. Then Joy acted on the next most important item on her agenda: calling on C. S. Lewis.122 Jack invited Joy and her boys to spend December 18–21 at The Kilns. The visit went swimmingly according to all participants. Joy wrote to Bill telling him that the boys were a big success with the Lewis brothers. And Jack spoke positively of the visit to one of his friends, though he was astonished at the energy of these small American boys.123 The Greshams’ visit to The Kilns was brief, but it was a prelude to a much expanded relationship in the years to come. And that wasn’t the only thing that was about to change in Jack Lewis’s life, for in 1954 he would receive an invitation to an academic post at Cambridge University, a position created with him in mind. NOTES 1. Walter Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 270.

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2. Ibid., 280. 3. Ibid., 303. 4. Ibid., 353. 5. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 45–54. 6. Personal communication. These comments from Father Arthur R. Lewis about C. S. Lewis were given in a talk delivered to a C. S. Lewis Tour Group that I led around England in 1997. 7. For C. S. Lewis’s side of the argument, see C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967), 12–36. 8. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 345–346. 9. Ibid., 357. 10. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942). 11. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 361–362. See also C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, 142–151. 12. See C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), Chapter 11, 80—85; and also Will Vaus, Mere Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 181–182. 13. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 373–374. 14. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), 70–74. 15. Ibid., 75–90. 16. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960), 106–132. 17. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 426–427. 18. This anecdote is taken from a private conversation with Canon John Fenton in Oxford and recorded in my diary during August 2000. 19. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942). 20. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 493. 21. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 274. 22. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 483. 23. Ibid., 530. 24. Ibid., 437. 25. Ibid., 432–433. 26. Sayer, Jack, 274. 27. Warnie had a reference number system for each of the letters he typed for his brother. For instance, the reference number on the above quoted letter was 52/9, indicating that this was the ninth letter he had typed for Jack so far in 1952. The next letter written to Mrs. Watson contains a reference back to the first letter: REF. 52/9. The letter to Mrs. Watson written on December 7, 1953, has the reference number 53/504, indicating it was the 504th letter Warnie typed for Jack in that year. And the letter to Mrs. Watson written on December 18, 1954, had the reference number 54/552. Thus we can gather that in the 1950s Warnie was averaging between five

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and six hundred letters per year that he typed for Jack. The bottom line is that the steady flow of mail to The Kilns from delighted readers, which began around the time The Screwtape Letters first appeared, continued unabated, at least until Jack’s death in 1963. 28. I have a copy of this letter in my possession given to me by Mrs. Edna Watson. 29. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 452. 30. Ibid., 453. 31. Martin Moynihan, ed., The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 71. 32. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 469–471. 33. Ibid., 496, 498, 502. These talks were vetted by The Rev. Dr. Austin Farrer (Anglican), Dom Bede Griffiths (Roman Catholic), The Rev. Joseph Dowell (Methodist), and Eric Fenn (Presbyterian). 34. C. S. Lewis, Broadcast Talks (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942). 35. C. S. Lewis, Christian Behaviour (New York: Macmillan, 1946). 36. C. S. Lewis, Beyond Personality (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944). 37. For the best account of Lewis’s work with the BBC, see Justin Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC (London: HarperCollins, 2002). 38. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 471–472. 39. Numbers 22: 24–31. 40. James Como, ed., C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1992), 188–189. 41. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 492. 42. David Graham, ed., We Remember C. S. Lewis (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2001), 127. 43. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 496. 44. Ibid., 569. 45. Ibid., 520. 46. Ibid., 504. 47. See Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 137–185. 48. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 551–552. 49. Ibid., 573. 50. Ibid., 577. 51. Ibid., 648. 52. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947). 53. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 596. 54. Ibid., 617. 55. See Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion & Guide (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 279. 56. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 700.

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57. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945). 58. C. S. Lewis, ed., Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), xiii–xiv. 59. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 649–650. 60. Ibid., 655–656. 61. C. S. Lewis, ed., Arthurian Torso (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). 62. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 891–893. 63. Ibid., 653. 64. C. S. Lewis, ed., George MacDonald: An Anthology (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). 65. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Brothers and Friends (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 184–185. 66. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 706. See also Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 190–191, for Warnie’s description of the trip. 67. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 737. 68. Ibid., 717. 69. Ibid., 718. 70. Sayer, Jack, 347–348, 422–423. 71. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 199–200. 72. Ibid., 201–207. 73. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 787, 789. 74. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 207–208. 75. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 830–831. 76. C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 28. 77. Ibid., 27. 78. Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 162–163. 79. Sayer, Jack, 307–308. 80. See C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1978), Chapter III, 12–24. 81. Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert! The Magazine of G. K. Chesterton, 4(5) (March 2001), 13. 82. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 883. 83. Chad Walsh, Apostle to the Skeptics (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 10. 84. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Glasgow: Collins, 1980), 238. See also Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 802, where Jack mentions in a 1947 letter that he tried writing a children’s fairy tale but it was so bad, according to the unanimous verdict of his friends, that he destroyed it! 85. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 240–241. 86. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 942–943. 87. Ibid., 1009. 88. Walter Hooper, ed., On Stories (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982), 53.

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89. Hooper, Collected Letters, Volume 2, 905–906. 90. Ibid., 943–945. 91. Ibid., 952–953. 92. Ibid., 962. 93. Ibid., 980. 94. Ibid., 952. 95. Ibid., 990–991. 96. Ibid., 995–996. 97. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 244. 98. Lyle Dorsett, And God Came In (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 70. 99. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 232–233. 100. Ibid., 235. 101. Walter Hooper and W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993), 404. 102. Ibid., 400. 103. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 236. 104. Hooper and W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 401. 105. Ibid., 406. See also Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead, C. S. Lewis Letters to Children (New York: Macmillan, 1985). 106. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 239–240. 107. Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 109. 108. See Walter Hooper, ed., They Stand Together (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 519–520. 109. Hooper, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 410. 110. See Vaus, Mere Theology, 99–100. 111. Hooper, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 412–413. 112. Ibid., 414–415. 113. Ibid., 414. 114. See Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954); Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955). 115. Dorsett, And God Came In, 79–80. 116. Sayer, Jack, 352–353. 117. Dorsett, And God Came In, 86. 118. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 244. 119. Dorsett, And God Came In, 88–89. 120. Ibid., 90–91. 121. Ibid., 92–94. 122. Ibid., 102–104. 123. Ibid., 104.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Anscombe, Elizabeth. Gilbert! The Magazine of G. K. Chesterton. 4(5) (March 2001). Barfield, Owen. Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Como, James, ed. C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1992. Davidman, Joy. Smoke on the Mountain. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954. ———. Foreword by C. S. Lewis. Smoke on the Mountain. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955. Dorsett, Lyle. And God Came In. New York: Macmillan, 1983. Dorsett, Lyle and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Marjorie Lamp, eds. C. S. Lewis Letters to Children. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Graham, David, Ed. We Remember C. S. Lewis. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2001. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Glasgow: Collins, 1980. Hooper, Walter, ed. C. S. Lewis: Companion & Guide. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———, ed. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———, ed. On Stories. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982. ———, ed. They Stand Together. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Hooper, Walter and W. H. Lewis, eds. Letters of C. S. Lewis. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1993. Kilby, Clyde S. and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Lewis, C. S. Beyond Personality. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944. ———. Broadcast Talks. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. ———. Christian Behaviour. New York: Macmillan, 1946. ———. Christian Reflections. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967. ———. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960. ———. The Great Divorce. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945. ———. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964. ———. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. ———. Miracles. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947. ———. Miracles. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1978. ———. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press, 1942. ———. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. ———. Transposition and other Addresses. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. ———, ed. Arthurian Torso. London: Oxford University Press, 1948. ———, ed. Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977. ———, ed. George MacDonald: An Anthology. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

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Moynihan, Martin, ed. The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998. Phillips, Justin. C. S. Lewis at the BBC. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994. Vanauken, Sheldon. A Severe Mercy: Davy’s Edition. San Francisco: Harper, 1980. Vaus, Will. Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004. Walsh, Chad. Apostle to the Skeptics. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1990.

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Lewis in Cambridge: The Professorial Years (1954–1963) Will Vaus

1954 Over the course of C. S. “Jack” Lewis’s many years at Oxford University he had been passed over, on numerous occasions, for any professorship there. In the early 1950s, in addition to this disappointment, Jack was becoming disenchanted with the direction that the English School was taking at Oxford. There was increasing pressure to include twentieth century literature in the course, to the neglect, Jack felt, of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Jack’s friends at Oxford were aware of his discontent, and one of them, at least, apparently had a plan for extricating Jack from the predicament of daily tutorials in term and awarding him with what he so very much deserved—a professorial chair. The friend who came to Jack’s rescue was none other than J. R. R. Tolkien. Tollers and Jack’s former English tutor, F. P. Wilson, were both on the Cambridge University board of electors. On January 18, 1954, the Council of the Senate of Cambridge University had stated its need for a Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English and on March 31 the formation of this new chair was announced. In May the board of electors met and, perhaps at the suggestion of Tolkien and Wilson, considered C. S. Lewis for the position. However, it came about, Lewis was elected unanimously, and Vice Chancellor Sir Henry

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Willink, Master of St. Mary Magdalene College, Cambridge, wrote to Jack informing him of the electors’ decision on May 11. Despite the advantages of the Cambridge chair, Jack at first declined the offer of the electors. He was concerned about leaving Warnie behind in Oxford and it didn’t seem feasible to move his entire household to Cambridge. Tolkien went to Jack and urged him to reconsider. Tolkien suggested that permanent residence in or around Cambridge was not necessary. He assured Jack that he could keep his home in Headington and live there on weekends and during vacations. Under these conditions Jack felt he could accept the new position. However, before Tolkien could get word to Sir Henry Willink of Jack’s acceptance, Willink went ahead and offered the position to the electors’ second choice, Helen Gardner. Miss Gardner was unsure about accepting the position at Cambridge because she had just recently been offered a University Readership in Renaissance English Literature at Oxford. Then, when she heard the rumor that Lewis had changed his mind about the professorship at Cambridge, she declined the offer of the Cambridge electors. Willink wrote to Lewis on June 3 informing him that Gardner had declined their offer and that he hoped Lewis would indeed accept the position after all. Jack wrote back on June 4 accepting the position. Since the chair was completely new it was not, at first, attached to any particular college. However, Jack was delighted when Sir Henry Willink’s college, Magdalene, offered him a Fellowship and rooms.1 Jack wrote to Sister Penelope informing her of the new job and the fact that he would be under the same patroness at Cambridge as he was at Oxford–St. Mary Magdalene.2 Jack’s scholarly career wasn’t the only thing that was progressing in 1954, so was his relationship with Joy Davidman, who was officially divorced from William Lindsey Gresham on August 5. In the Spring of 1954, Jack paid the tuition, room, and board in order for Joy’s sons, David and Douglas, to continue at Dane Court preparatory school in Surrey.3 And when the fifth Narnian chronicle, The Horse and His Boy, was published on September 6 it was dedicated to David and Douglas. Later that same month, on September 16, Oxford University Press published Jack’s mammoth English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. In the preface, Jack acknowledged Joy’s help with the proofs.4 In the process of writing the book Jack had read almost everything written in English in the sixteenth century and the reviews of the book honored that fact. The Times Literary Supplement said: “Mr. Lewis . . . knows how to make his learning felt—you feel, reading him, that he has read what he is talking about.” John Wain wrote in The Spectator: “Mr. Lewis, now as always, writes as if inviting us to a feast.” Even Helen Gardner, who did not agree with all of Lewis’s conclusions, wrote in The New Statesman and Nation that Lewis’s. “. . . capacity

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for enjoyment . . . enables him to write with astonishing freshness on subjects which might be thought to be exhausted.”5 On October 27, Jack had to go to London to participate in a debate with Dorothy Sayers. While there he spent time with Joy Davidman and her parents, the latter being on a tour of Europe. They shared tea at a Piccadilly hotel together. Jen and Joe Davidman, who were atheists, were willing to overlook Jack’s credentials as a Christian apologist given the fact that he was such a brilliant Oxford don. However, Jack, for his part, had difficulty overlooking father Davidman’s priggishness, though he tried his best to be kind and hospitable.6 The highlight for Jack of the year 1954 had to be his fifty-sixth birthday on November 29 when he gave his inaugural lecture at Cambridge entitled De Descriptione Temporum. Dr. G. M. Trevelyan, Master of Trinity at Cambridge, presided for the occasion and reported that this was, in his experience, the only university appointment in which there was a unanimous vote of the electing committee. The largest lecture room in Mill Lane was packed and people coming late had to find a seat on the floor. Jack’s main theme was the problem of periods in history;7 he insisted that the great divide was not between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but between the time of Jane Austen and our own. Jack referred to himself as a dinosaur, belonging more to this earlier period than to the twentieth century, one of the few remaining representatives of Old Western Man, as he called it.8 Jack still had to finish up his work as a don at Oxford. He gave his last tutorial at Magdalen College on December 3. However, his old college elected him to an honorary fellowship upon his departure. 1955 At the beginning of January, Jack took up residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Joy Davidman helped him with the move.9 On the 17th, Jack wrote to Mrs. Edward A. Allen telling her that, in many ways, he regretted leaving Oxford, but after 30 years of the tutorial grind he was looking forward to the less strenuous work of a professor. (Soon he would be giving his first series of lectures, in Lent Term, as the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature on “Prolegomena to the Study of Our Earlier Poetry.”) Jack also noted in his letter to Allen that many of his colleagues at Cambridge were Christians, more so than at Oxford. And he greatly enjoyed the fact that Cambridge had not been industrialized like Oxford; there was still a green belt around the town that gave it more of a country feel.10 Jack’s Oxford friends adjusted to the move in such a way that they could still maintain regular contact with him. The Inklings moved their meeting at the Eagle & Child pub to Mondays before Jack would catch the train

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from Oxford to Cambridge. Sometimes they would also visit the Trout in Godstow. Then Jack’s doctor, Humphrey Havard, and one or two others, would accompany Jack to Oxford station, or perhaps to Islip station out in the countryside. They would sit with him in the train until the whistle blew. Jack would make a game of it, trying to keep his friends on the train until it left the station. In fact, sometimes his Oxford friends would go with him all the way to Cambridge, dining with him at Magdalene, enjoying a long evening of conversation, then sleeping in one of the guest rooms of the college.11 Jack’s daily schedule at Cambridge was similar to that at Oxford, minus the tutorials. He would rise early, go for a stroll in the Fellow’s Garden, and then attend matins in chapel at 8 o’clock. Afterwards he would eat breakfast then attend to his voluminous correspondence, now without the help of Warnie who remained in Oxford. If time allowed he would also write lectures, work on books in progress or read until lunchtime. In the afternoon he liked to go for a walk somewhere around Cambridge. He was good with a map and soon discovered the best footpaths in the immediate vicinity. Occasionally he would invite a colleague to join him and they would start the walk in the morning with a stop at a pub for bread and cheese and beer. Then they would continue in the afternoon, ending with a stop for tea. When Jack returned to college there was more work to be done before dinner in hall. He enjoyed a glass of port in the Senior Common Room after dinner. Then he would return to his room for yet more work. He would end the day with tea before bed, often inviting others, both colleagues and undergraduates, to enjoy a cup with him.12 Weekends and vacations were spent at home in Oxford. During his first holiday at home, between Lent and Easter Terms at Cambridge, Jack lamented to Joy that he couldn’t get a good idea for a book. They kicked a few ideas around together until one came to life. The next day Jack wrote the first chapter of what would become Till We Have Faces.13 The novel was based upon an idea that had lingered in Jack’s mind since undergraduate days and was a re-working of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The book was eventually dedicated to Joy Davidman who, in a way, inspired some of Jack’s later works.14 In August 1955, Joy and her boys moved from London to 10 Old High Street, Headington, a short walk away from The Kilns. The 10 Old High was a three bedroom, semi-detached, red-brick house with a rather large garden where Joy later cultivated flowers, herbs, and fruit. Jack had located the house for them and he paid the rent.15 As Warnie later noted, by 1955, Joy was on close terms with Jack. For Jack, at first, the attraction was intellectual. Though he had met many sharp women in his time, Joy was the first who had a brain to match his own in suppleness, width of interest, analytical grasp, as well as in overall humor and sense of fun.16 Once Joy moved into 10 Old High

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Street Jack began to visit her every day when he was home from Cambridge. Warnie noted that it was now obvious what was going to happen.17 When Chad and Eva Walsh visited with Jack and Joy that summer, Eva sensed that a marriage was in the offing.18 Eva Walsh wasn’t the only one who wondered what the relationship precisely was between Jack and Joy. Apparently after spending a holiday together in Ireland, Arthur Greeves queried Jack about it. Jack wrote to Arthur in October saying that nothing had yet changed between him and Joy and that he didn’t think they were in any sort of “false position.” Everyone concerned would be told the status of their relationship. Jack assured Arthur that a “real” marriage would not be happening. To Jack, at that point in time, such would be adultery. Besides, Jack said, he didn’t want a “real” marriage with Joy.19 Whatever the relationship was between Jack and Joy at this point in time the double entendre in the title of Lewis’s autobiography, published that autumn, was not lost on Jack’s closest friends. The famous joke that subsequently went around Oxford ran like this: “Have you heard what’s happened to C. S. Lewis?” “No.” “He’s been surprised by Joy!” 1956 In early 1956, Jack and Joy had another surprise; the British Home Office refused to renew Joy’s visa.20 Joy did not want to go back to America and Jack didn’t want her to go. She was enjoying her new life in England, thought the schools were better than in America, and didn’t want to take the boys back closer to their father. Joy turned to Jack for advice. Jack could think of only one way that Joy could remain in England, and that was to marry a British citizen. Thus Jack offered to marry Joy to prevent her deportation back to America. C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham were married in a civil ceremony at the Oxford Registry Office on April 23, 1956. Jack only told his closest friends about the marriage: Arthur Greeves, George Sayer, Roger Lancelyn Green, Kay and Austin Farrer.21 He subsequently told his brother Warnie that the marriage was a mere formality performed so that Joy could go on living in England and that they would all go on living just as they had before.22 So, Joy went on living with her boys at 10 Old High Street. Jack went on with his work at Cambridge, living at The Kilns only on weekends and during holidays. But when he was at home he would visit Joy every day, sometimes staying at her house until 11 o’clock at night. Joy began to press for her rights as Mrs. Lewis, pointing out to Jack that the neighbors were beginning to talk. Therefore arrangements were made to move Joy and the boys into The Kilns23 and make the knowledge of their marriage more public.

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However, those plans were interrupted when, in October, it was discovered that Joy had cancer. She had been experiencing pain for some time in her left hip. It was thought to be fibrositis. But when her hip gave out in October and she was rushed to the Wingfield Hospital, the doctors found that cancer had eaten through her left femur and she had a malignant lump in her breast. She underwent three operations in November: surgery to repair the broken femur, removal of the lump in her breast and removal of her ovaries as a precaution.24 Jack moved the boys into The Kilns and prepared to announce his marriage to the world. He wrote to Arthur Greeves on November 25 telling him that Joy was in hospital suffering from cancer. Jack told his oldest and dearest friend it would be a tragedy for him to lose Joy. Furthermore he explained that if Joy was released from hospital she would not be able to care for herself and therefore she would be coming home to The Kilns. To avoid scandal, news of their marriage would soon be published.25 On Christmas Eve 1956, Jack put a notice in The Times that said: “A marriage has taken place between Professor C. S. Lewis of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Mrs. Joy Gresham, now a patient in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford. It is requested that no letters be sent.”26 The same day Jack replied to a card from Dorothy Sayers. He explained to her about his marriage to Joy and her move to The Kilns, assuring her that nothing wrong was going to happen, especially since certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man.27 1957 Despite Jack’s disclaimers, he was falling in love with Joy, and it was the threat of death that made him admit his true feelings.28 Joy wanted the blessing of the sacrament of marriage before her death, and so Jack sought permission from the Bishop of Oxford for an ecclesiastical marriage. Bishop Harry Carpenter could not approve the marriage because the official Anglican position was against remarriage of divorced persons.29 However, he was sympathetic to Jack and Joy’s plight and said that his view did not bind the conscience of any individual priest. In the midst of this horrific time Jack heard that one of his former pupils, Father Peter Bide, had a spiritual gift of healing. He asked Bide to come and lay hands on Joy. When Bide arrived in Headington the subject of marriage was discussed.30 Jack apparently changed his view on divorce by this time; he told Bide he disagreed with the official position of the Anglican Church. He viewed Joy’s marriage to Bill Gresham as no marriage at all since Bill had a former wife still living.31 Without being asked and merely being told of the

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situation, Bide agreed to marry Jack and Joy. On March 21, 1957, Jack and Joy had a bedside marriage and Nuptial Mass.32 In April, Joy was sent home to The Kilns to die. On April 2, Bill Gresham wrote to his ex-wife to inform her that, in the event of her death, he would want David and Douglas to live with him. Joy was very disheartened by this letter. David reacted with anger, Douglas with tears. For the first time Jack intervened between Joy and Bill; he wrote two letters to Bill on April 6 urging him to reconsider and telling him, in no uncertain terms, that if he did not back off he would put every legal obstacle in his way to prevent the boys’ return to his custody in America. As a result of Jack’s letters Bill withdrew his request.33 In June, Jack wrote to Dorothy Sayers telling her of the ecclesiastical marriage and how his feelings for Joy had changed. Despite Joy being bedridden, the couple was enjoying much gaiety. Jack told Sayers that his heart was breaking, yet at the same time he had never known such happiness.34 When Jack wrote to his friend, Dom Bede Griffiths, at the end of September he reported that Joy’s condition had improved. If it was not a miracle it was at least a wonderful reprieve. Jack also told Griffiths how his love for Joy had begun as Agape, proceeded to Philia, then to Pity and finally to Eros.35 Thus Joy inspired yet another of Jack’s books, The Four Loves; originally planned as radio talks for the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation in America, the talks were transformed into a full-length book published in 1960.36 In November, Jack wrote to Sister Penelope about Joy’s movement from death’s door to arrested cancer, to disappearance of cancer, to new bone being made. Joy was even walking around the house and garden with a cane. In the same letter Jack reported about his own bone disease–osteoporosis.37 When Joy’s pain was at its worst Jack had prayed that he might be able to bear it for her—a sort of “Charles Williams substitution.”38 The amazing thing is that it really happened. As Joy was gaining calcium in her bones, Jack was losing his, thus the osteoporosis.39 Jack also told Sister Penelope of his work on what would become The Discarded Image,40 a distillation of his lectures on Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry. At the end of November, Jack wrote to Arthur Greeves telling him that Joy’s recovery had gone beyond anything they had hoped for. His own osteoporosis was much better and he was out of pain. He told Arthur that he was writing nothing but academic work, except for an unambitious work on the Psalms which was now finished.41 This book would be titled Reflections on the Psalms and was another book inspired, in part, by Joy, and the Jewish perspective she gave to Jack on the Old Testament. The book was dedicated to Jack and Joy’s mutual friends Austin and Kay Farrer and was published in 1958.42

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1958 Once Joy had sprung back to life she helped her new home to do the same. In early 1958 she set about painting and repairing The Kilns that had fallen into a state of almost total neglect over the years. There were holes in the floors, walls, and ceilings. Carpets were in tattered rags from Jack and Warnie scattering their cigarette ashes on them for 30 years. Jack’s friends referred to The Kilns as “The Midden,” an old English word for a rubbish heap; apparently the title was apt. It was a ramshackle house held up by books. Joy was afraid that if they moved the bookshelves the whole place would come crumbling down. So she set about the work of refurbishment with some degree of caution. The central heating system, which hadn’t worked in ages, was overhauled and put back in working order. Floors, walls, and ceilings were repaired. A fresh coat of paint and new carpets did wonders. Blackout curtains from the war were removed and replaced with fine draperies. Joy even bought new china and crystal to complement the delicious meals she served as hostess at The Kilns. Outside the house, Joy did what she could to stop trespassers. She put up a barbed-wire fence. When one of the villagers cut the wire, Joy bought a shotgun. That put an end to trespassing! Joy also got Paxford the gardener to get the grounds of The Kilns back into shape. The vegetable garden and flower beds were re-dug and planted. The dilapidated greenhouse was reconstructed with a new heating system. Once the whole job was done The Kilns became a paradise to which Jack was happy to invite friends once again.43 Fixing up the Kilns wasn’t the only thing Joy helped Jack to do. Jack was concerned about all the money Joy was spending to refurbish the place. Since childhood, and especially since his impoverished days as an undergraduate, Jack was always afraid of ending up in the poor house. In reality, he needn’t have worried. Even though Jack only earned a modest salary from Cambridge, and gave away two-thirds of the income from his religious book sales, he still was moderately well off. His real problem was that he never managed his own funds well. This is precisely what Joy helped him begin to do. She took over his checkbook, in the process discovering thousands of pounds Jack didn’t know he had. Then she took that small fortune and put it in a savings account and made investments on Jack’s behalf.44 As Joy began to feel better she also went on short excursions with Jack outside of The Kilns. In January 1958 she accompanied him back to Cambridge, by car, for the beginning of the Lent Term.45 Their driver, Clifford Morris, would also take Jack and Joy out to Studley Priory in Horton-cumStudley, Oxfordshire, for Sunday lunch or afternoon tea.46 The Priory was a Benedictine nunnery founded in the twelfth century. At the Dissolution

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of the Monasteries under Henry VIII the estate was purchased by the Croke family and remained in the hands of their descendants for 335 years. In Jack and Joy’s time Studley Priory had become a private club for academics and in 1961 was converted into a hotel, which it remains to the present.47 The first time Jack and Joy went away together to stay at a country hotel, Jack, confirmed old bachelor that he was, couldn’t get the thought out of his mind that he was being rather naughty, staying with a woman at a hotel!48 By May, Joy was so well that she and Jack decided to go on a jaunt to Ireland together, which they did for 10 days in the first half of July.49 They stayed at The Old Inn, Crawfordsburn, for their belated honeymoon and Joy met Arthur Greeves for the first time. Jack and Joy’s stay in Crawfordsburn was just one part of a delightful trip that also included visits to Donegal, Louth, and the rest of County Down. Jack wrote to a correspondent in August saying that they returned from Ireland “drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom.”50 They flew to Ireland in a plane, which was their first experience of air-travel. After the initial fright of take-off, Jack and Joy found it enchanting. Peering through the clouds to glimpse the world where he was born was a beautiful experience for Jack. Joy thought Ireland the most austerely beautiful place she had ever seen.51 That same summer Jack and Joy had lunch with Jack’s old friend and colleague Nevill Coghill at Merton College, Oxford. Looking at Joy across a grassy quadrangle Jack remarked to Nevill that he never expected to have in his sixties the happiness that passed him by in his twenties.52 1959 Jack was given a number of honors in 1959. On March 26 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford, where he had been an undergraduate student. On May 13 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Manchester University.53 And after the publication of Reflections on the Psalms, Jack had been asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury to serve on the Commission for Revision of the Psalter for the Church of England. (He was also consulted on the translation of the New Testament for The New English Bible that came out in 1961.) Jack humbly accepted this honor and was involved in the work of the Commission throughout 1959. Ironically, in this situation Jack was to work with his old literary nemesis, T. S. Eliot. Though they disagreed about poetry the two got on rather well on a personal level.54 Another ironic event took place in the Spring of 1959. The man who had laid hands on Joy, Peter Bide, had a wife who was dying from cancer. Jack

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wrote to Bide in April, assuring him of his prayers.55 In addition, Jack asked other friends to pray for Bide and his wife.56 Around the same time, one of Jack’s old friends from Belfast died. Her name was Janie McNeill, to whom That Hideous Strength was dedicated. Jack wrote an obituary for her that appeared in the magazine of his old school, Campbell College, where Janie’s father had been headmaster.57 In July, Jack and Joy again spent a fortnight in Ireland. They stayed at The Old Inn, Crawfordsburn, and visited with Arthur Greeves. They also went to the Royal Fort Hotel, Rathmullan, County Donegal.58 Later in the summer Jack and Joy took David and Douglas for a holiday in the little Welsh fishing village of Solva. Joy and her boys had already been there the previous year and had a delightful time. The train trip was a bit harrowing for the two adults who weren’t completely well. And at first the Ship Inn was not to Jack’s liking; it was an old building full of low ceilings, narrow and difficult stairways to navigate, and somewhat uncomfortable rooms. But once Jack went for a moonlit walk and smelled the heather and sea lavender in the air, he was overcome by the magic of the place. Later that night Jack sat in the bar with a pint in one hand and his pipe in the other, listening to the songs of Welsh fishermen. What could be finer?59 Unfortunately, the delights of those summer evenings on holiday were not to last. In October, Jack wrote to one of his regular American correspondents, Mary Willis Shelburne, asking her to redouble her prayers for Joy. The last x-rays had revealed cancerous spots returning to her bones. The recovery of 1957 was apparently only a reprieve, not a pardon.60 On Christmas Day, 1959, Jack wrote to another correspondent, Father Peter Milward asking: “Can one without presumption ever ask for a second miracle?”61 1960 1960 was another big publishing year for the redoubtable C. S. Lewis. In February, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays was published in America.62 This book contained seven essays: “The Efficacy of Prayer,” “On Obstinacy in Belief,” “Lilies that Fester,” “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” “Good Work and Good Works,” “Religion and Rocketry,” and “The World’s Last Night.” While the title essay focused on the Second Coming of Christ, in the essay on prayer Jack mentioned his wife’s healing as an answer to prayer. In March, Geoffrey Bles published The Four Loves. In this book Jack examined the four Greek words for love: Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape. The book also contained a chapter on “Likings and Loves for the Sub-human” so Jack could cover his love for animals and the need to treat them with dignity. Jack dedicated this work to Chad Walsh.

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In September, The University of Cambridge published Studies in Words.63 The book was based upon lectures Jack had given at Cambridge. In it he examined ten words (nature, sad, wit, free, sense, simple, conscience, conscious, world, life) and one phrase (I dare say). Jack’s study was from a lexical and historical perspective, demonstrating how the English language has changed over many years, teaching the reader to be attuned to different meanings when reading English works of an earlier period. 1960 was truly a year of joy, followed by great sadness, for C. S. Lewis. As the sword of Damocles hung over their heads, Jack and Joy planned and fulfilled one of Joy’s life-long dreams: a trip to Greece. In 1959 their friends, June and Roger Lancelyn Green, had gone on a tour to Greece and came back with a glowing report for Jack and Joy. Thus the four planned to do a similar trip together, April 3–14, 1960. Their plans were carried out despite the return of Joy’s cancer. An account of the trip, based upon Green’s diary, is given in C. S. Lewis: A Biography.64 On their first afternoon in Athens Jack and Joy were able to climb to the top of the Acropolis where they sat on the steps of the Propylaea and drank in the magic and mystery of the Parthenon. At the Hotel Thermai on the island of Rhodes, the Greens and the Lewises enjoyed a hilarious dinner, sampling several new Cretan wines. Roger learned quickly that alcohol was the best relief for Joy’s physical pain, so he always made sure that there was ouzo ready at their table when Joy disembarked from the coach or car. On Easter, the four attended part of a service in an Orthodox Cathedral. When they returned from their dream-trip Jack wrote to Chad Walsh that it was, from one point of view, madness. But neither he nor Joy regretted it. He reported to Walsh about Joy’s feats of strength, climbing the Acropolis, limping up through the Lion Gate of Mycenae, and tramping about the medieval city of Rhodes, which Jack came to regard as the Earthly Paradise. He told Walsh that Joy seemed to be divinely supported during their trip and that she returned home in a nunc dimittis frame of mind, ready to die.65 Joy returned from Greece greatly diminished in strength; her muscles had been overtaxed. The original cancerous growth in her right breast returned. It was removed in May, and Joy seemed to recover fairly easily from the operation.66 She returned home to The Kilns a fortnight after the operation. This good spell was not to last for long. On Tuesday, June 21, Warnie wrote in his diary that Joy was dying in the Acland Nursing Home. Thinking that she really was dying, Joy asked the nurse to have her boys come home from school to see her. Doug arrived in tears, having heard the news from his headmaster, who drove him all the way from Wales to Oxford. However, everyone was fooled once again, and Joy recovered temporarily, returning home to The Kilns on June 27.67

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On July 3, Joy was doing well enough to go to Studley Priory with Jack for their usual Sunday dinner. The next day she even went for a drive in the Cotswolds. On Tuesday, July 12, Joy was in good spirits. She and Jack did a crossword puzzle together and played Scrabble. That night they had a long and nourishing talk.68 But the next morning, Warnie, who slept in the room over Joy, woke to hear his sister-in-law screaming in pain. Jack rang for the doctor who arrived before 7 a.m. and gave Joy some pain medication. Jack was able to persuade Joy’s surgeon to give her a bed in a private ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Once she got to the hospital she dozed from time to time, but then she would return to full consciousness. During those final hours she told Jack how happy he had made her, and that she was at peace with God. She asked Jack to have her cremated, telling him she didn’t want a posh coffin because posh coffins were all rot. She gave her fur coat to Katherine Farrer as a dying gift, and then she received Absolution from Austin Farrer, whom she asked to read her funeral service. She died around 10:15 that night, Wednesday, July 13, 1960.69 Joy’s funeral service took place on Monday, July 18, at the Oxford Crematorium where her ashes were interred. Jack, Warnie, David, Douglas, and a few others were present for the service. Sadly, none of Jack’s friends attended the funeral except for the Farrers. Austin was so overcome that he wept openly as he read the service. It was a windy day full of sunshine; Doug felt that God had given his mother a fine and fitting farewell to this world.70 Jack was so overcome by grief that he turned to his best means of coping, just to get through each day. That means was writing. In August 1960 he began writing his thoughts on his own grief in a diary. Every day he would write something and then read it back to himself. When Roger Lancelyn Green came to visit and learned of Jack’s journal he asked if he might read it. When he did, he realized what immense help Jack’s diary might be to others going through the winding valley of grief. At first Jack was reluctant to publish his private journal; the emotions expressed in it were too raw. However, Roger persuaded Jack to publish. Thus Jack’s journal was typed up as a manuscript and sent off to his literary agent, Curtis Brown, with instructions to have the book published pseudonymously by a publisher Jack had never worked with. The agent sent the manuscript to Faber and Faber under the pen name, Dimidius, which means “cut in half.” The pen name was a very accurate description of what Jack felt had happened to him with Joy’s death; he was one flesh with her, and now that flesh had been cut in half. T. S. Eliot, who worked for Faber at that time, recognized the writing as that of C. S. Lewis and suggested that he use a less unusual pen name. Jack chose N. W. Clerk. He had previously published numerous poems in Punch under the initials N. W., which in Jack’s mind stood for the Anglo Saxon “Nat

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Wilk.” A “clerk” in Anglo Saxon terminology meant a “scholar.” Thus the pen name, taken together, meant “I know not what scholar.” Faber published A Grief Observed by N. W. Clerk in September 1961.71 Few copies were sold until the book was re-issued under Lewis’s own name after his death.72 Curiously enough, some of the people who knew Jack and who read A Grief Observed by N. W. Clerk, thought the book would be helpful to Jack, so they sent him copies of his own book, not realizing he was the author. 1961 Another book that germinated after Joy’s death was An Experiment in Criticism, published in 1961.73 Jack was distressed by the way so many of his students looked at great literature only through the spectacles of what the literary critics said about such books. His solution to this problem was to suggest looking at books from the reader’s point of view. He concluded that a good reader is one who re-reads certain books and has his or her life enriched in the process. In Experiment Jack expressed his long-held conviction that great books enlarge one’s being by admitting us to experiences different from our own. After Joy’s death Jack continued his regular schedule at Cambridge but all of this was interrupted by an event that took place in June 1961, following a delightful visit with Arthur Greeves in Oxford. Arthur noticed during his visit that Jack was not looking well.74 After Arthur returned to Belfast, Jack went to see his doctor, Humphrey Havard, complaining that he was having difficulty urinating. Humphrey diagnosed an enlarged prostate gland and booked a room for Jack in the Acland Nursing Home. The surgeon at the Acland came to the conclusion that Jack was not well enough to survive an operation on his prostate. Jack’s kidneys were infected and poisoning his blood. This in turn was causing heart irregularities. Jack had a catheter inserted that drained into a bag. Antibiotics were prescribed and he was put on a low-calorie, low-protein diet. He had to sleep upright in a chair and could not handle stairs. Jack was told he must quit smoking, which he absolutely refused to do. He had smoked for most of his life and he felt to give it up would make him too irritable. The doctors also told him he could not return to Cambridge for the Michaelmas Term, and he had to have regular blood transfusions.75 In spite of all this Jack never lost his sense of humor. He wrote to Kathleen Raine, a colleague at Cambridge: “Dracula must have led a horrid life!”76 From Jack’s own perspective one positive outcome of his physical condition was that he had no more sex drive. He wrote to his friend Griffiths on December 20, 1961, telling him that when he buried Joy he prayed that

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his whole sexual nature would be buried with her. Now that is exactly what happened. One recurrent trial in Jack’s life was finally over with and he felt like he had been set free.77 1962 In a way Jack enjoyed being an invalid. As he later wrote to T. S. Eliot, his condition kept him from doing some things he liked, but it also excused him from doing a number of things he didn’t like!78 Jack had always relished the way a cold would force him to his bed where he could do nothing but read. So that is what he did once again. Since he couldn’t be lecturing at Cambridge he spent all his time reading and writing. His major work of this time was on revising his Oxford and Cambridge lectures on the prolegomena to medieval literature. These lectures took book form in The Discarded Image. Jack also worked on collecting old essays to be placed in a new book, They Asked for a Paper, published by Geoffrey Bles in February 1962.79 In April, Jack was allowed by his doctors to return to his work at Cambridge on an “experimental” basis. George Sayer drove him there one Monday. On the way they stopped at Woburn Abbey where the Dukes of Bedford have lived for over 350 years. Jack and George entered the woods by a small gate. Walking through the wood by a narrow path they suddenly found themselves in an open glade surrounded by miniature deer. Jack was touched by the magic of it all and told his friend that even while he was writing the Narnia books he never imagined anything as beautiful.80 When Jack and George Sayer visited Woburn it was still a completely private estate and Jack was worried about being caught for trespassing. Today the house is open to the public for tours, and the grounds have been turned into a safari and deer park with nine species of deer.81 After his return to Cambridge, Jack wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne,82 and later to Arthur Greeves,83 telling them that the Cambridge experiment was a great success and that he was feeling better than he had since June of 1961. However, going on holiday to Ireland was definitely out of the question for the summer of 1962. Jack needed to be near his doctors in case something went wrong with the “plumbing” as he called it, in other words, the catheter. In the autumn of 1962, Jack returned to Cambridge. He also gave his last talk for the BBC. This one was on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The talk was recorded from The Kilns and broadcast on October 16.84 At the same time Jack was making plans to visit Arthur Greeves in Ireland, taking his step-son Douglas along, in the summer of 1963.85 For many years Jack had tried to write a book on prayer but it never came together the way he would have liked it to do so. Then, in the latter part of

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1962, a form suggested itself. Why not write a book on prayer in the form of fictitious letters to a friend? That is exactly what Jack did. He named the friend Malcolm and his friend had a wife Betty and son George. This format enabled Jack to say what he wanted about prayer without sounding too preachy, and while maintaining the humility he thought necessary for a layman like him writing on such a personal subject.86 1963 Jack continued to have health problems in early 1963. He had a bad night in mid-January where he woke up and was in need of the surgeon, perhaps to fix a problem with his catheter; the plumbing was still going wrong. Warnie was away and so Jack had no one to help him. He called for an ambulance, but the ambulance was not able to get up the driveway to The Kilns due to snow. Jack had to walk down to Kiln Lane in the freezing cold and wait for the ambulance from 2 to 2:20 a.m. Even so he enjoyed the full moonlight on the snow. And he was back in bed at The Kilns by 6 o’clock the same morning.87 Despite his health problems, Jack was able to return to Cambridge for the Lent and Easter Terms of 1963. Friends who saw him then said he was jovial and witty as ever. The Inklings continued to meet, though not at The Eagle and Child pub. The former meeting place had to be given up because it had become “intolerably cold, dark, noisy and child-pestered.” So the Inklings moved across the street to The Lamb and Flag, continuing to see Jack off to Cambridge every Monday in term time.88 From January to April, Jack continued working on Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. In June, Jack wrote to his publisher, Jocelyn Gibb at Geoffrey Bles, telling him that he simply could not write a blurb for the fly-leaf of the book. Jack felt like he was never very good at what he called “blurbology.” He simply wanted the blurb to make the point that the author was not trying to “teach” anything about prayer. In the end, Jack’s simple notes to Gibb did shape the blurb on the fly-leaf of the first edition, which read as follows: Malcolm is a friend of C. S. Lewis’ to whom he writes these letters: twenty-two of them. Prayer is the theme; not corporate but private prayer. It could be a delicate subject but Mr. Lewis, as we would expect, does not treat it as anything strange or awkward. He simply asks his readers to imagine themselves being allowed to listen to two very ordinary laymen discussing the practical and speculative problems of prayer as these appear to them: the last thing he would claim is to be teaching. Some passages are controversial, but this, he tells us, is almost by accident. The wayfaring Christian cannot altogether ignore recent Anglican theology when it has

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been built as a barricade across the high road. The book ends with a haunting passage of speculation about the Resurrection of the body.

The last “haunting passage” was a new bit that Jack added to the last letter and sent to Gibb in June.89 In the same month, Jack returned from Cambridge to The Kilns for the long vacation. Warnie had gone off to Ireland for a holiday, and so Jack was alone on June 7 when he had a young man from North Carolina join him for tea at The Kilns. The man’s name was Walter Hooper and he had been corresponding with Jack since 1954. The two met together on numerous occasions in the weeks that followed, and Jack eventually asked Hooper to help him with his correspondence, in Warnie’s absence.90 In July, Jack’s ankles began to swell again—a danger sign revealing that his kidneys were not functioning properly.91 Regretfully, he wrote to Arthur canceling his jaunt to Ireland with his step-son.92 On July 15 Jack went into the Acland Nursing Home for an examination. While there he had a heart attack and went into a coma for almost 24 hours, enabled to breathe only by means of an oxygen mask.93 The doctors told Austin and Kay Farrer that they thought Jack was dying. The Farrers informed their friends and, at 2 p.m. on July 16, the Reverend Michael Watts of the Church of St. Mary Magdalen gave Jack extreme unction, anointing him with oil. To everyone’s astonishment, at 3 p.m. Jack woke from the coma and asked for tea.94 Attempts were made to contact Warnie in Ireland and inform him of Jack’s condition. George Sayer traveled there only to find out that Warnie was in Dublin for the day, not at Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda. Warnie was apparently afraid of receiving bad news from home and so had not opened any letters with an Oxford postmark. The staff at Our Lady of Lourdes thought Warnie was not fit to travel and that he would drink himself into oblivion if he learned that Jack was dangerously ill. The staff promised to break the news to Warnie gently, by the time he was ready to go home. So George Sayer left the matter to be handled by the doctors and nurses in Drogheda.95 In the weeks that followed Jack experienced hallucinations and was generally not himself. After three weeks in hospital he regained his rational faculties, and slowly, his physical strength. On August 6 he returned home to The Kilns with Walter Hooper and a nurse, Alec Ross, to look after him. Sadly, one of the first things Jack did upon arrival at The Kilns was to write to Cambridge and resign his Chair and Fellowship at Magdalene College. He knew he would never be well enough again to return to work there.96 Douglas Gresham and Walter Hooper were dispatched to pack up Jack’s books and belongings and remove them from his rooms in Cambridge. Toward the end of August, Walter returned to the United States; he had to teach one more

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semester at the University of Kentucky before returning to Oxford to continue helping Jack as his secretary.97 On September 11, Jack wrote to Arthur, explaining what had happened to him in July and how sad he was at the thought of possibly not seeing Arthur again in this life. Jack confided to Arthur that Warnie had deserted him and was, presumably, drinking himself to death in Ireland.98 Alec Ross, Paxford, and Mrs. Miller, the housekeeper, were the only ones left at The Kilns to look after Jack since Douglas was away at boarding school in Surrey, and David had moved to New York where he was engaged in Hebraic studies.99 Jack further commented to Arthur on what a pity it was that he had revived in July. He made a similar comment in a letter to Sister Penelope a week later. Jack thought that Lazarus ought to be considered the first martyr since, after Jesus raised him from the dead, Lazarus had all his dying to do over again!100 In the end Warnie did return to The Kilns, some time in the latter half of September. He later wrote that by early October it was apparent to both of them that Jack was going to die soon. But their last days together were not without some happiness. It was as if life had come full circle. They were together again in “the little end room” just as they had been at Little Lea.101 Jack faced the prospect of his own death bravely and calmly, almost with a sense of keen anticipation. He wrote to a correspondent at the end of September saying that autumn was really the best of the seasons and that, perhaps, old age was the best part of life. But like autumn, old age doesn’t last.102 Jack spent the autumn of 1963 correcting proofs for The Discarded Image. In October he wrote his last article. It was written for The Saturday Evening Post and was entitled “We Have No Right to Happiness.”103 Sometime during his last months he told Warnie that he had done everything he wanted to do and that he was ready to go. His only regret during his final weeks was that he had to turn down the opportunity to deliver the Romanes lecture at Oxford.104 On Monday, November 18, Jack went to his last meeting of the Inklings at The Lamb and Flag. Colin Hardie was the only one to show up. But Jack enjoyed his pint anyway.105 Friday, November 22, 1963, began like any other day for Clive Staples Lewis: breakfast, followed by correspondence and then the crossword puzzle, the latter a habit picked up from his years with Joy. After lunch Jack fell asleep in his chair. Warnie suggested he might like to move to his bed. At four o’clock Warnie took tea in to his brother’s bedroom. They exchanged a few words. At 5:30 Warnie heard a crash and ran in to find Jack collapsed at the foot of his bed. A few moments later Jack Lewis breathed his last. A week later he would have turned sixty-five.106 The news of Jack’s death was overshadowed by the death of another Jack that same day: John F. Kennedy, assassinated in Dallas. Coincidentally, Aldous

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Huxley also died the same day in California. (Lewis scholar Peter Kreeft has written an entertaining, imaginative, Socratic dialogue between the three somewhere beyond death.)107 Jack’s funeral took place on Tuesday, November 26. He was buried in the churchyard at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, a short walk from The Kilns. On his grave-marker Warnie later had placed the words that appeared on the family calendar the day of their mother’s death: “Men must endure their going hence.” Warnie could not endure the passing of his brother and so was not present at the funeral. Those who were present included: The Reverend R. E. Head, Austin Farrer, Douglas Gresham, Maureen Moore, J. R. R. Tolkien, R. E. Havard, Owen Barfield, George Sayer, A. C. Harwood, Peter Bide, and Fred Paxford.108 The books that C. S. Lewis finished in the last year of his life were published posthumously in 1964: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer and The Discarded Image. The latter book was dedicated to Roger Lancelyn Green who had, so often, provided his watch for Jack to use during his lectures at Oxford. Since that time more books have been written about C. S. Lewis and his works than he wrote during his 65 years on planet earth. Today there are over 200 million copies of his own books in print, making C. S. Lewis the best-selling Christian author of all time, outside of the Bible. The Narnia books alone have now sold over 100 million copies. And it has been said, that after Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul, C. S. Lewis is one of the most quoted spokesman for Christianity.109 By almost any measure, Clive Staples Lewis was a remarkable human being. NOTES 1. For the most complete and accurate history of C. S. Lewis’s election to the Cambridge chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature, see Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis Companion and Guide (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 66–69. 2. Walter Hooper and W. H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1993), 439. 3. Lyle Dorsett, And God Came In (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 109. 4. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), vii. 5. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis Companion and Guide, 507–508. 6. Dorsett, And God Came In, 110–111. 7. Hooper, C. S. Lewis Companion and Guide, 71–72. 8. C. S. Lewis, They Asked for a Paper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 9–25. 9. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), 359. 10. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 445. 11. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 231.

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12. James T. Como, ed., C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1992), 100–103. 13. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956). 14. Dorsett, And God Came In, 116–117. See also Sayer, Jack, 361. 15. Ibid., 111–112. 16. W. H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 23. 17. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, ed. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 245. 18. Dorsett, And God Came In, 114. 19. Walter Hooper, ed., They Stand Together (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 534. 20. Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005), 149. 21. Ibid., 150. See also Sayer, Jack, 363 and Dorsett, And God Came In, 122. 22. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 245. 23. Ibid. 24. Dorsett, And God Came In, 123–124. 25. Hooper, They Stand Together, 264–265. 26. Sayer, Jack, 365–366. 27. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 461. 28. Ibid., 466. 29. Sayer, Jack, 367. 30. Ibid., 368. 31. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 466. 32. See Warnie’s diary entry for this day in Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 245–246. 33. Dorsett, And God Came In, 134–135. 34. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 466. 35. Ibid., 469–470. 36. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960). 37. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 470–471. 38. Sayer, Jack, 369. 39. Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: Davy’s Edition (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 227–228. 40. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 41. Hooper, They Stand Together, 545. 42. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1958). 43. See Dorsett, And God Came In, 132, and Gresham, Jack’s Life, 152–153, 155–156. 44. Dorsett, And God Came In, 133. 45. Clyde S. Kilby, ed., Letters to an American Lady (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 68. 46. See Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 192–201.

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47. Gresham, Jack’s Life, 153. 48. Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 72. 49. Hooper, They Stand Together, 547. 50. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 474. 51. Dorsett, And God Came In, 138. 52. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Glasgow: Collins, 1980), 270. See also Jocelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 63. 53. Hooper, Companion and Guide, 125. 54. Ibid., 90–91. 55. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 477. 56. Ibid., 479. See also Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 79. 57. Hooper, They Stand Together, 550–551. 58. Ibid., 552. 59. Douglas Gresham, Lenten Lands (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 105–107. 60. Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 85. 61. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 487. 62. C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1987). 63. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 64. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 271–275. 65. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 488. 66. Ibid. 67. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 248–249. 68. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 491–493. 69. Kilby and Mead, Brothers and Friends, 249–250. 70. Ibid., 250–251. See also Gresham, Lenten Lands, 128. 71. Gresham, Jack’s Life, 158–159. 72. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). 73. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). 74. Hooper, They Stand Together, 559–560. 75. Sayer, Jack, 399–401. 76. William Griffin, Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 427. 77. Ibid., 428. 78. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 503. 79. Sayer, Jack, 401–402. 80. Ibid., 402. 81. Hilary Bird and Mary Scott, Eyewitness Travel Guides: Great Britain (New York: DK Publishing, 1996), 216. 82. Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 101.

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83. Hooper, They Stand Together, 561. 84. This talk is reprinted in Walter Hooper, ed., Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). A copy of the original recording may be obtained from The Episcopal Media Center, 644 West Peachtree Street, Suite, 300, Atlanta, GA 30308-1925, 800-229-3788, www.episcopalmediacenter.org. The talk on Bunyan is part of a four-talk series on compact disc entitled: C. S. Lewis Speaks His Mind. A recording of The Four Loves is also available from the Episcopal Media Center. 85. Hooper, They Stand Together, 562. 86. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 297. 87. Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 110. 88. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 297. 89. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 508. 90. Hooper, Companion and Guide, 116–117. 91. Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 118. 92. Hooper, They Stand Together, 565. 93. Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 120. 94. Hooper, Companion and Guide, 116–117. 95. Sayer, Jack, 405–406. 96. Kilby, Letters to an American Lady, 120. 97. Gresham, Lenten Lands, 153–154. 98. Hooper, They Stand Together, 565–566. 99. Hooper, Companion and Guide, 118. 100. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 509. 101. W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 24. 102. Hooper and Lewis, Letters, 509. 103. See C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 317–322. 104. W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 24–25. 105. Griffin, Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life, 447. 106. W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 25. 107. Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven and Hell (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982). 108. Hooper, Companion and Guide, 119. 109. John D. Woodbridge, General ed., Great Leaders of the Christian Church (Chicago: Moody Press, 1988), 355. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bird, Hilary and Mary Scott. Eyewitness Travel Guides: Great Britain. New York: DK Publishing, 1996. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Como, James T., ed. C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1992.

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Dorsett, Lyle. And God Came In. New York: Macmillan, 1983. Gibb, Jocelyn, ed. Light on C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, 1976. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Glasgow: Collins, 1980. Gresham, Douglas. Jack’s Life. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005. ———. Lenten Lands. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Griffin, William. Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Hooper, Walter, C. S. Lewis Companion and Guide. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———, ed. Selected Literary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———, ed. They Stand Together. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Hooper, Walter and W. H. Lewis, eds. Letters of C. S. Lewis. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1993. Kilby, Clyde S., ed. Letters to an American Lady. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. Kilby, Clyde S. and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Kreeft, Peter. Between Heaven and Hell. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982. Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. ———. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. ———. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. ———. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960. ———. A Grief Observed. London: Faber and Faber, 1964. ———. Reflections on the Psalms. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1958. ———. Studies In Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. They Asked for a Paper. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962. ———. Till We Have Faces. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956. ———. The World’s Last Night and Other Essays. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1987. Lewis, W. H. Letters of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, 1966. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994. Vanauken, Sheldon. A Severe Mercy: Davy’s Edition. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980. Woodbridge, John D., ed. Great Leaders of the Christian Church. Chicago: Moody Press, 1988.

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10

C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield: Adversaries and Confidantes Jane Hipolito

The ground for C. S. Lewis’s and Barfield’s friendship was prepared in their childhoods, which were similar in several interesting ways. Barfield was born in Muswell Hill, London, on November 9, 1898, just 20 days before Lewis was born in Belfast. The youngest of four children, Barfield, like Lewis, was a solicitor’s son. He attended Highgate School in North London, where he made a lifelong friend, his classmate Alfred Cecil Harwood (1898–1975). Like Lewis and his childhood friend, Arthur Greeves, Barfield and Harwood were what Lewis termed “First Friends,” sharing key interests, tastes, and discoveries. One particularly significant discovery occurred early in their friendship, when they were 11 or 12 years old. Like Lewis’s childhood experience of “joy,” it was life-changing. More than 60 years later, Barfield still clearly remembered every detail of the brief moment, just before the Latin syntax class lesson was to begin, when Harwood’s appreciative remark about a particular metaphor radically transformed his perspective on language: “You can say ‘Cato died.’ You can also say ‘Cato walked out of life.’ Well, of course the Subject [that is, Barfield] himself was familiar with other metaphors, with figurative language, figures of speech; but it had never occurred to him before that it was possible to enjoy them, to relish them, for their own sake.”1 This transformative recognition of the joy of reading, which directly prompted Barfield’s lifelong

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analytic and creative work with language, was one of the most foundational and enduring elements in his friendship with Harwood, and soon with Lewis, as well. Like Lewis, Barfield and Harwood were exceptionally studious and bright. On December 14, 1916, the Times of London carried an announcement that all three had won scholarships in classics to Oxford: Barfield to Wadham College, Harwood to Christ Church College, Lewis to University College. The First World War intervened, however, and like Lewis, Barfield and Harwood entered the army. Before the war ended, poetry became a central interest for both Lewis and Barfield. Spirits in Bondage, a book of Lewis’s poems, was published in 1919, the same year that Barfield and Harwood, safely home, were reunited as classmates, now in the University. Barfield, who had, like Lewis, “definitely concluded that lyric poetry was perhaps one of the best things in life, and certainly the most hopeful thing, in the prevailing materialistic climate of opinion,”2 switched his major from classics to English. Lewis and Barfield met at Oxford in the late autumn of 1919, at about the time each turned twenty-one. They were introduced by a fellow undergraduate, Leo Baker, because he recognized that they shared a deep love of poetry. Writing about the encounter long afterward, Barfield described “the level gaze and the eagerness behind the level gaze, of a shabbily dressed undergraduate who bicycled in from Headington and met me for tea in the rooms of a mutual friend in Oxford in November 1919.”3 Throughout the next several months after that initial meeting, Baker, Barfield, and Lewis, together with other kindred spirits including Harwood, Eric Beckett, and Walter Field, met frequently in one another’s college rooms to discuss poetry and ideas. What Harwood later wrote about Field applied equally to every member of the group: “he read poetry, as he read life, for its meaning, and without what Chaucer calls ‘high sentence’ the beauty of sound and imagery had little effect on him.”4 They also read and critiqued each other’s poems, and together planned what they hoped would become an annual anthology of their and others’ work. An early predecessor of the Inklings, this small, informal circle of friends vigorously championed the Romantic spirit. The poems they wrote had a musicality and imaginative core that were in strong contrast to the kind of poetry which was then fashionable. Although the group did not succeed in finding a publisher for their volume and abandoned the project, they continued to encourage and support each other’s creative work for years afterward. Another important way in which this undergraduate circle was like the Inklings was that each participant contributed something different and essential to it. This also was true for the annual Easter-time walking tours that members of the group took together after their student years until the Second

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World War made such expeditions impossible. Lewis wrote to Field in 1943, “The whole point about the Walk is that all the members are unlike and indispensable. Owen’s dark, labyrinthine pertinacious arguments, my bow-wow dogmatism, Cecil’s unmoved tranquility, your needle-like or grey-hound-like keenness, are four instruments in a quartette.” He concluded, “The thing is an image of what the whole world ought to be: wedded unlikes. Roll on the day when it can function again.”5 During the first two years of their friendship Lewis and Barfield were not nearly so close as they would soon become. For one thing, both men were tremendously busy. In most respects they were working along parallel though separate lines; each was studying hard and was active in his own college, Lewis as President of the Martlets, the literary society of University College, and Barfield as President of the Wadham College Literary Society. Lewis, however, had substantial domestic responsibilities as surrogate son and brother in the Moore household, in addition to his campus duties. For his part Barfield, a talented dancer, was very much involved in the Oxford University branch of the English Folk Dance Society, which held weekly practices in Wadham College, and beginning in the summer of 1920 he also served as a principal dancer, writer, and “J. P. of the Log” of the Falmouth Music Club, later called the Falmouth Opera Singers, a touring company centered in Cornwall. Both Lewis’s and Barfield’s extra-curricular involvements were outgrowths of their experiences in World War I, for Lewis was keeping the promise he had made to his friend Edward (Paddy) Moore to look after Moore’s mother and sister, and the dance and music groups were motivated by the hugely popular postwar enthusiasm expressed in the opening lines of Barfield’s “Prologue to Songs and Dances of Many Lands”: This we believe: that nations truly live Not in the wealth which they from others take But in that wealth which to the world they give, The songs and dances that their people make.6

In 1920, Lewis took First Class Honors in Classical Moderations and immediately began reading for his second B.A. degree, in “Greats.” A year later, in 1921, Barfield took a First in English. According to both men, their friendship came fully alive during the next two years, when Barfield began working toward his Bachelor of Literature (B.Litt.) in English and Lewis was earning two additional Firsts, in “Greats” (1922) and then in English (1923). Although each was now engaged in advanced scholarly study and research, they continued to compose poems, read and respond to each other’s new work, and heartily support one another’s aspirations as poets. One particularly happy moment occurred on May 1, 1922, when Lewis received “[a] letter from

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Barfield, accepting [Lewis’s lyric poem] “Joy” for the Beacon and saying nice things.”7 Piercingly beautiful and strongly crafted, the poem also is notable because it is Lewis’s first published statement of his life-changing experience of being “surprised by joy.” Barfield too was writing poems out of his own experience at this time; in June, 1922, the London Mercury published an eloquently passionate sonnet sequence that he composed in response to a failed love affair. As Lewis noted in his diary, Barfield clearly had matured into “a real poet.”8 Increasingly, their friendship deepened through their spirited debates concerning literature and ideas. The question that most intensely engaged them was whether the imagination can convey truth or not. The question met them everywhere during the postwar years, when its aspects and ramifications were energetically explored by leading figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Traditional ideas about human consciousness were challenged, many thought exploded, by Freud’s research into the psyche and Havelock Ellis’s into sexuality. Simultaneously, intriguing alternatives to the nineteenthcentury worldview were opened by the new evolutionary cosmology, the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics, New Age movements such as theosophy, and the newly serious study of myth and folklore. Valuing each other’s intellect, character, and creativity as they did, Lewis and Barfield naturally talked about these absorbing ideas together, but when they did, each discovered that the other was what Lewis later termed the prototypical Second Friend: “Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all from a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one.”9 A particularly emphatic and significant disagreement between Lewis and Barfield concerned the wishful thinking exemplified by Christina Pontifex, a character in Samuel Butler’s 1903 English novel, The Way of All Flesh. To Lewis, “Christina dreams” seemed dangerously escapist and destructive. “I condemned them,” he wrote in his diary for May 24, 1922, summarizing that afternoon’s conversation with Barfield; “the love dream made a man incapable of real love, the hero dream made him a coward. He took the opposite view and a stubborn argument followed.”10 At that stage in his life, Lewis was urgently concerned about fantasizing, not only because he saw it as a pervasive modern phenomenon but also and especially because, as his biographer George Sayer remarks, for the past several years Lewis had been “worried by the intensity of his imagination and alarmed by his tendency to withdraw from life and to luxuriate in selfflattering fantasies of love, cruelty, lust, or heroism.” In Surprised by Joy, Lewis explains that his attitude toward the “Christina dream” at that time was part of his recently acquired

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intellectual ‘New Look.’ There was to be no more pessimism, no more self-pity, no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions. In a word, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, I formed the ‘of always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense.’ And good sense meant, for me at that moment, a retreat, almost a panic-stricken flight, from all the sort of romanticism which had hitherto been the chief concern of my life.11

To Barfield, however, as Lewis noted in his diary on June 27, 1922, “there was no essential difference between the Christina and art,” and both were essentially healthy. Barfield had entered Oxford already aware that for him, “the world became a profounder and a more meaningful place when seen through the eyes that had been reading poetry.”12 His continuing experiences as a creative writer as well as his scholarly studies, especially of Romanticism, strengthened this awareness. By the summer of 1922, he had explored the nature of the imaginative experience in several published articles and reviews, and had begun to study it in depth in his B.Litt. thesis, Poetic Diction. Nonetheless, Barfield also had serious questions about the reality of imaginative experience, for he had been, as he later said, deeply “conditioned by the whole intellectual climate in which he was brought up, to suspect that somehow it might all be a subjective illusion,”13 a suspicion that Lewis thoroughly shared. And like Lewis, Barfield was very troubled by escapism, as is particularly evident in his 1922 short story, “Seven Letters.” Astrid Diener points out that in this story, “Barfield’s criticism (from which he evidently does not exclude himself ) . . . is mainly directed at the complacent detachment of an educated class who appear to pursue their intellectual interests with a complete disregard for social realities—the social realities of a system which is in Barfield’s view brutal and exploitative.”14 Both men found that they needed to write substantial imaginative works in order to develop their thinking about the “Christina dream.” Lewis’s long narrative poem Dymer (1926) centers on a hero of mythic stature “who had succumbed to its allurements and finally got the better of them,” as Lewis wrote in his preface to the poem’s 1950 edition. By contrast, Barfield’s first novel, The Silver Trumpet (1925), is a children’s fairy tale that celebrates the wonderful power of love to awaken moral imagination. Lewis’s diary records his delighted admiration of The Silver Trumpet, which he read in manuscript in 1923, as well as Barfield’s and Harwood’s enthusiasm about Dymer, which Lewis brought to them in installments for their critiques over many months while he was writing it.15 Harwood was an important third participant in Lewis’s and Barfield’s discussions during the early 1920s, when he too was striving to write real poetry while simultaneously doing graduate study, having earned First Class

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Honors in Classical Moderations in 1921. Lewis liked Harwood very much. Indeed, in a letter to Barfield in July, 1939, Lewis, conscious that another major war was approaching, wrote, “I was wondering the other day how many of my friends I shd. continue to love if the common intellectual interests were taken away (which perhaps do not survive death) and Harwood and you were the only two I felt much confidence about. So little do the years add!” As we have seen, one of the qualities that Lewis particularly loved in Harwood was his “unmoved tranquility,” the imperturbability which he humorously describes in Surprised by Joy as unshakeable even during “a walking tour when the last light of a wet evening had just revealed some ghastly error in map-reading (probably his own) and the best hope was ‘Five miles to Mudham (if we could find it) and we might get beds there.’ “Barfield also valued Harwood’s lifelong “deep-rooted serenity of spirit” as well as his “faculty, when under heavy pressure, to keep the mind calmly and steadily fixed on a comparatively distant future,” or foresightedness, and thought they were Harwood’s signature strengths.16 During a summer visit to Lewis’s home, Harwood told him about Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), a German philosopher who had recently founded a new movement called anthroposophy that purported to be a “science of the spirit.” “Steiner seems to be a sort of panpsychist, with a vein of posing superstition, and I was very much disappointed to hear that both Harwood and Barfield were impressed by him,” Lewis wrote in his diary on July 7, 1923. More than half a century later, he vividly recalled his horrified reaction: “Everything that I had labored so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends but those whom I would have thought safest; the one so immovable, the other brought up in a free-thinking family and so immune from all ‘superstition’ that he had hardly heard of Christianity itself until he went to school.” Learning more about anthroposophy did not relieve Lewis’s mind; to the contrary, his “horror turned into disgust and resentment.”17 Simultaneously, Barfield and Harwood became more and more deeply interested in Steiner’s ideas. By the end of 1924, Harwood was dedicatedly working to found the first Steiner (or Waldorf ) school in England, both he and Barfield had joined the Anthroposophical Society—and Lewis’s debate with Barfield concerning the imagination had enlarged to encompass anthroposophical concepts as well. In one of the many interviews that he gave to students of the Inklings, Barfield remarked: “Lewis, at one time in his early life, was very much attracted by occultism—but attracted in the quite the wrong way, as a kind of black magic, fiddling with power, and he suddenly realized that it was all wrong and discarded it. For a long time he practically identified this with

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Anthroposophy without knowing anything about Anthroposophy.”18 Barfield had a very different concept of Steiner’s approach, as is clear in his first published statement about anthroposophy, his March 20, 1924, letter to the editor of The New Age: A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art, which declares that anybody who feels an instinctive distrust for authority and dogma, whether it emanates from a Church, a Mahatma Letter, or a Science lecture-room, and who at the same time believes that knowledge has a somewhat more inviting future before it than the prospect of tracing the law of cause and effect one step further back behind the electron, is making a great mistake if he does not put himself to the trouble of finding out whether Steiner has anything to tell him.19

Barfield, who had already published numerous articles, reviews, and short stories that thoughtfully challenge the “authority and dogma” of the modern mindset, thought that these endemic problems must be combated, not merely discussed and deplored, and certainly not ignored. Steiner’s “science of the spirit” was attractive to him both because it emphasized clear, nondogmatic thinking and because it offered new ways of applying such thinking in a wide range of fields, including education, agriculture, economics, and the arts. This was one of anthroposophy’s chief appeals to Harwood, too, as well as to many others. For instance, in the summer of 1922, England’s Minister of Education presided over a Conference on Spiritual Values in Education and Social Life held at Oxford; Steiner was the featured speaker at the conference, which hundreds attended and which The Oxford Chronicle reported was very likely the first of its kind anywhere. One of those who were lastingly inspired by the ideas that Steiner expressed in Oxford was Daphne Olivier (later Daphne Harwood), who attended the follow-up conference in Stuttgart. It was through this fellow member of the English Folk Dance Society that Barfield and Harwood first learned about anthroposophy, sometime in the spring of 1923.20 Neither of them embraced it immediately, however. For several months they read English-language translations of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Christianity as Mystical Fact, How to Know Higher Worlds, and other books by Steiner, attended weekly anthroposophical gatherings in London, and critically examined Steiner’s ideas by testing them against what they already knew and discussing them with each other and with Lewis. Gradually, their initial skepticism was replaced by the conviction that anthroposophy afforded valid, practical remedies for the “danger, ugliness and waste”21 that confronted them in the modern world. One element of anthroposophy which gave Lewis particular pause was Steiner’s assertion that human consciousness is perpetually evolving. Barfield

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has explained that Lewis “held the view that in the history of man and of the universe as a whole, either there is no thread of development or that if there is any such, knowledge of it is firmly withheld from man.”22 As with the “Christina dream,” Barfield held the opposite view. The idea of evolution of consciousness interested him before he heard of anthroposophy, and indeed he had already found evidence of it through his own study of language: “Language, for me, seemed like an archaeological record of our past. By digging through that record I became convinced that our present-day consciousness is very different from that of our ancient ancestors.”23 Barfield’s postgraduate research into the changing meanings of words began in 1922 and resulted in two books—History in English Words (1926) and his B.Litt. thesis, which was published in a somewhat revised form in 1928 as Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. The principal thesis of History in English Words is that “language has preserved for us the inner living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.”24 Written for the general public, the book is at once erudite and engaging, in David Lavery’s words a “rich, fascinating guide to the history of the western world as revealed by etymological reflections on common English words.” The history that Barfield finds embedded in English words is humanity’s “vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind of outlook which we may loosely describe as ‘mythological’ to the kind which we may describe equally loosely as ‘intellectual thought’”; it is a process of internalization, “the shifting of the centre of gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal human being himself.” Although Lewis staunchly rejected Barfield’s evolutionary outlook, there also were important areas of agreement. Paul Leopold observes that “Everything Lewis wrote shows his awareness of the history of meaning stored up in words (as Owen Barfield said), like ‘the energy of sunlight in coal’ . . . Barfield taught Lewis many things, but nowhere, I suspect, was his influence greater than in this.”25 The influence in fact was strongly reciprocal, as Barfield’s next book demonstrates. History in English Words concludes with a consideration of the Romantic impulse and its stirring call to explore the inner world that dreaming and creative imagining disclose. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning is a philosophically informed response to that call. The book’s remarkable philosophical clarity and coherence owe a very great deal to its unofficial mentor, Lewis, who critiqued Barfield’s ideas and commented on his manuscript chapters with the outstanding intellectual rigor, attention to detail, and selfless nurturing of others’ thinking that he was already bringing to his work as a member of Oxford’s faculty. Lionel Adey points out one especially significant thing that Barfield learned from Lewis at that time:

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Lewis made a fundamental contribution to Barfield’s intellectual development by pointing out the parallel between the concept of ‘poetic’ with “prosaic” thinking and Aristotle’s concepts of active and passive reason (poiein and paschein) . . . This antithesis, together with another one originally considered by Aristotle, that between Knowing and Knowledge, underpin the book’s whole edifice . . . Barfield . . . defines as “poetic” the language that quickens into life whatever objects or experiences in the poet’s mind it acts upon, and as “prosaic” the language employing words denotatively and in fixed order. Poetic language forever creates new metaphors and explores new connections; prosaic language employs dead metaphors in literal or even abstract senses.26

Poetic Diction also is informed by Barfield’s experience of a “felt change of consciousness,” a change that somehow enabled his consciousness to bridge the prosaic and poetic; and in fact this mysterious experience, which had impelled him to become an English major, motivated the writing of the book. Interestingly, it was Lewis who proposed including the word “felt” in this phrase—an indication of how deeply he understood this crucial alteration of consciousness himself. Barfield describes it in the documentary film Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning: I began to find that I had very sharp experiences in reading poetry. Not so much of whole poems, or certainly not long poems. But particular phrases, particular lines, seemed to have some kind of—one uses the word ‘magic’—I don’t think I can think of any other. . . . Especially metaphors, particularly metaphors, really, seemed to say things to me that nothing else did. And it seemed to be something which was untouchable by the over-riding materialism of my outlook. And so I started to write about that.27

Two articles that Barfield published in the spring of 1926 provide clues to how he thought through his ideas concerning poetic diction, step by step working out precisely how it is that “the imaginative use of words enhances their meanings, and that those meanings reveal areas of reality we ‘normally’ ignore.”28 One of these articles, “Metaphor,” is an early version of what was very substantially refocused, deepened, and developed into the “Metaphor” chapter of Poetic Diction, with Lewis’s detailed advice on both the ideas and the wording. “After one has realized the metaphorical nature of language,” Barfield notes in his article, “the next thing that strikes one most forcibly is the way in which this power of throwing out metaphorical shoots appears to increase as we climb back down to its stem and toward its roots.” Reasoning from this etymological evidence, in the “Metaphor” chapter Barfield exposes the absurdity of the widespread modern assumption that language has progressed “from simplicity and darkness to complexity and light.” The modern scholar,

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he writes, “seems to have gone out of his way to seek for impossibly modern and abstract concepts to project into that luckless dustbin of pseudo-scientific fantasies—the mind of primitive man.”29 Contrastingly, to the genuine critic, the spiritual fact of his own aesthetic experience when once he knows inwardly that it is purged of all personal affection, must have at least equal weight with any historical or scientific facts which may be placed beside it. Beyond that, it must be his aim, as it is the aim of all knowledge, to reconcile or relate conceptually all the elements included in his perceptual experience; among this latter he must number his own aesthetic experience.30

Shortly after Poetic Diction was published, Lewis wrote a congratulatory letter to Barfield that contains the cheerful announcement, “I think in general that I am going to agree with the whole book more than we thought I did. We really are at one about imagination as the source of meanings, i.e. almost of objects. We both agree that it is the prius [that is, necessary prior condition] of truth.” As he explains in Surprised by Joy, in challenging Barfield to think clearly and coherently about language and the imagination, Lewis himself came to recognize and shed what he later called his “‘chronological snobbery,’ the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Barfield also helped Lewis realize that each age has not only its own outlook but its own illusions, and that the “genuine” criticism that both friends were resolved to practice must be both historically informed and true to their actual aesthetic experience; in particular, Lewis learned from Barfield “a more respectful, if not more delighted, attitude toward Pagan myth.” All of Lewis’s subsequent scholarly and imaginative writings demonstrate how thoroughly “much of the thought which Barfield afterward put into Poetic Diction” had become Lewis’s own.31 At the same time that Barfield was writing Poetic Diction, he was exploring anthroposophy and noticing that he experienced the same kind of “felt change of consciousness” when reading Steiner’s statements that metaphors brought him. Additionally, as he learned about Steiner’s ideas concerning imagination and inspiration, he found that they connected significantly with what he was reading in Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the other great Romantic authors. Barfield integrated these two discoveries in “Romanticism and Anthroposophy” (1926), his first published discussion of his theory that anthroposophy is “Romanticism come of age.” The part of Barfield’s discussion that Lewis most strenuously disputed was the proposal that “Anthroposophical activity can take up the Romantic impulse into itself and endow it with fresh life and youth” through imaginative and inspired cognition developed according to Steiner’s guidelines. Lewis thought that Steiner’s exercises for strengthening

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perception and knowledge were useless at best and quite possibly dangerous. As he wrote to Harwood in October, 1926, “Seeking to know (in the only way we can know) more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths ‘in our bones’: if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.”32 Lewis made these points even more forcefully and at considerably greater length in his “Great War” conversations and correspondence with Barfield. Lewis’s criticisms had a lifelong positive effect on Barfield’s thinking; his subsequent writings, both anthroposophical and mainstream, are impressive evidence that he had lastingly “learned to think out his positions and to appreciate the value of strict logic,” as he later said.33 Lewis also was significantly changed by the debate, for after several months of vigorous dialogue he became convinced by Barfield’s counter-arguments that his own “realistic” outlook could not be reconciled or related conceptually with his actual experience: “Unless I were to accept an unbelievable alternative, I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.” In 1926 Lewis abandoned philosophical realism and became an absolute idealist; and in 1929 he exchanged idealism for theism: “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed, perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”34 As Lewis appreciatively acknowledged, Barfield had a definite role in helping him take this very important second step toward Christianity. By the late 1920s he was finding that “nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack [of believers]; Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself,” and that his friends’ conversations more and more “revealed to me my own frivolity.” Barfield, however, did not see Lewis as at all “frivolous,” and was very grateful for what he learned from him about the idealist perspective: “He had a big hand in transforming a mere theory into an experience for me. I mean . . . the merger of the individual consciousness into the Absolute, so that there is ultimately no individual self. . . . Before his conversion he himself was trying to make it a real experience and in argument I learned a tremendous lot from him from that point of view.”35 Throughout the “Great War” period in their friendship, Lewis and Barfield sought opportunities to converse and walk together. In April 1923, Barfield married Matilda (Maud) Christian Douie, a talented dancer and expert in historically informed performance practice, whom he had met in the summer of 1920 when he first performed with the Falmouth Music Society. Much of the time the young couple lived in London, where they could be conveniently close to publishing firms, for in that period Barfield was a freelance writer as well as a scholar. But they both loved the English countryside, and so they

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rented a cottage in Long Crendon, a village about 15 miles from Oxford, where they spent weekends and an extended time in the summer. It was in that tiny cottage that Barfield began to write Poetic Diction. Lewis visited the Barfields in London and also bicycled over to their Long Crendon cottage; and they sometimes visited him in his private home, where they were cordially welcomed. Mrs. Moore very much liked Barfield and Harwood as soon as she met them in 1922, and both she and Lewis took to Maud Barfield, as well. Whenever Lewis and Barfield saw each other during those visits, they found opportunities to talk about literature and ideas, often while walking in the Oxford region. In addition, the two friends explored great works of literature together, such as the writings of Aeschylus and of Dante, reading them aloud in the original languages, creating instant translations into English, and discussing them with intense thoughtfulness and joy. As we have already seen, another activity that Lewis enormously enjoyed was the annual walking tour which he, Barfield, Harwood, their Oxford friend Fields, and from time to time one or two others took through the English countryside for three or four days each springtime, during the Easter vacation. Barfield and Harwood had begun to take walking tours some years before, and Lewis, who was an enthusiastic walker himself, embraced the possibility as soon as he learned of it. Usually Harwood, whom Lewis called the “Lord of the Walks” because of his expertise, planned the walking routes, which needed to be scenic, on chalky rather than boggy soil, and affording pubs and lodgings at appropriate intervals along the way. Humphrey Carpenter remarks in The Inklings that “they certainly set a good pace, and would reckon to do perhaps 20 miles a day. . . . The kind of day they really liked was one such as in Dorset when they got through the serious arguments in the ten miles before lunch and came down to mere fooling and school-boy jokes as the shadows lengthened.”36 The deep camaraderie among the walkers, particularly that between Lewis and Barfield, is evident in the wonderfully vivid reports in Lewis’s correspondence of several of the walking tours. Because of their intellectual intimacy, Barfield was able to help Lewis define what “joy” meant to him, just as Lewis provided the word “felt” for his friend’s change of consciousness. In the spring of 1929, shortly before Lewis discovered that he was a theist, the Barfields, who had honeymooned in Chartres six years earlier, returned to the Continent; they visited Germany for several weeks during which he learned German, and afterward spent a few days in Italy. Years later, Barfield recalled “sitting with Lewis in his garden a few weeks after I came back” from that trip: [H]e put the point of view that it was unworthy to want things badly—as I say, it may or may not have been in connection with love—that the only way out really was to

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identify yourself with the universe. And I remember I rapped out without thinking, “Nonsense, a man must have his Sehnsucht! ” . . . I took the point of view that, yes, you ought to be trying to identify yourself with the macrocosm, but that your yearning and wanting things badly was really part of your being. I was rather full of the word Sehnsucht, having read so much of Novalis. 37

A few months after this conversation, Barfield finished writing his novel, English People. The novel provides an interesting imaginative perspective on its author’s “Great War” with Lewis, for like Lewis and Barfield, each of the novel’s four central characters has a distinctly different outlook from the others, and much of the novel consists of the conversations in which they examine their shared thoughts and yearnings from the multiple viewpoints represented in their circle. The quality of their conversation is reminiscent of the “Great War” correspondence as well, for it is consistently lively, earnest, and thoughtful; like Lewis and Barfield, each participant unfailingly strives to discover the truth rather than to score points. English People concludes with “The Rose on the Ash-Heap,” a M¨archen, or fairytale for grown-ups, which brilliantly epitomizes the novel’s core themes in the form of a pilgrimage story. A few years later Lewis wrote his own pilgrimage story, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), which Barfield thought “contains some of the most brilliant writing he gave us.”38 Like English People and especially its concluding M¨archen, Lewis’s narrative provides an imaginative review of much of what he and Barfield had worked through together in their “Great War” as well as of other formative experiences that were his alone. The landmarks along his pilgrim’s path include several areas that he and Barfield had jointly explored, including History’s cave-dwelling and the House of Wisdom where Lewis’s fictional “Rudolf Steiner” resides. Lewis wrote to Barfield that The Pilgrim’s Regress and the M¨archen form “a pretty pair.”39 It is indeed useful to consider the two works side by side, for each complements the other in content and also in style, and the contrasts point to key differences in their authors’ outlooks. Lewis credited Barfield with bringing him back to Christian faith, telling a correspondent that “his attacks on my own presuppositions smashed the ordinary pseudo-‘scientific’ world-picture for ever.”40 A particularly significant contribution to this learning process seems to have been Barfield’s essay on “Death,” which was written in 1930, a few months after Lewis’s father had died. In C. S. Lewis: A Biography, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper comment that “it is not until the summer of 1930 that his letters show that he had given any thought to the possibility of there being an afterlife. What may have set him thinking was an article on ‘Death’ written by Barfield, which Lewis particularly admired because of its similarity to MacDonald’s treatment of the subject.” Death, Barfield writes, must be understood as a

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spiritual phenomenon, rather than a merely physical one, and coming to terms with it requires active moral will; in this process, the genuine seeker for truth “puts on immortality” and also discovers “what you have been seeking all your life. For all your life long you have been seeking Another.” Fifteen years later, when Lewis was considering what might best comprise a book of essays in memory of Charles Williams, he listed this piece by Barfield, tellingly mistitling it “Immortality.” In later years, immortality would become one of the most important topics in Lewis’s own writings.41 About a month after he read “Death,” Lewis stayed with the Barfields in Long Crendon for a few idyllic days during which he and Barfield read Beowulf and Dante’s Paradiso, Barfield taught him to dive headfirst (a breakthrough that “had enormous religious consequences” for Lewis, Hooper has pointed out)42 , and the three merrily planned a Bacchic festival for the following summer, when they hoped to be able to drink the wine that the Barfields were making from the grapes that were growing on their cottage. Also during that summer and autumn, Barfield taught ninth-grade English in the New School (later Michael Hall), the Steiner school in Streatham, London, where Harwood was one of the founding teachers. A fairytale that Barfield wrote for his students, “The Child and the Giant,” imaginatively portrays their emergence from the “chrysalis” of the lower school into the new learning environment of the upper school. As it happened, he and Lewis each were about to emerge from a chrysalis themselves. Toward the end of 1930, Barfield decided to go to law school and join the family law firm, Barfield and Barfield, working there as a clerk while earning the B.C.L. degree that would enable him to practice law as a solicitor. He made this decision in a spirit of sober responsibility, in order to provide for his wife and son and also to ease the crushing workload for his father, whose partner and older brother, Barfield’s uncle, had recently died. Lewis’s brother Warren sympathetically noted Barfield’s news in his diary on November 15, 1930.43 Characteristically, the Lewis household gave Barfield solid practical as well as moral support in his new profession: they promptly engaged the novice law clerk to regularize their wills; they turned to him for help in working out the details of the very complicated mortgage for the Kilns in 1931; and as Barfield gratefully recalled, his friendship with Lewis was a lifeline for him throughout his 30 years as an attorney because it helped keep him in touch with literature, philosophy, and his own sense of humor.44 Lewis became a Christian in February 1931, very soon after Barfield entered the legal profession. Remembering that moment, Barfield wrote: “I could never feel the word conversion quite an appropriate one to describe his spiritual change. It too much connotes a violent change of direction. Though he had certainly abandoned his belief in Christianity some years before I met him,

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I never remember a time when the moral aspect of any question under discussion was not the one which principally engaged his attention.” In 1929, Barfield had pointed to another significant aspect of his friend’s spiritual direction. Lewis wrote to Greeves about that conversation: “He said . . . that he thought the idea of the spiritual world as home—the discovery of homeliness in that wh. is otherwise so remote—the feeling that you are coming back tho’ to a place you have never yet reached—was peculiar to the British, and thought that Macdonald, Chesterton, and I, had this more than anyone else.” This is indeed how The Pilgrim’s Regress presents the soul’s journey toward conversion; in Lewis’s telling, it is a spiritual homecoming “tho’ to a place you have never yet reached.”45 Barfield had become a Christian several years earlier, when he was beginning to develop History in English Words and Poetic Diction. “I was brought up as an agnostic, but, partly perhaps through my father, who was a convinced admirer of Tolstoy, that did not prevent me from wishing the Gospels were true,”46 he later said; and it remained no more than a wish for some time, for as we have seen, in the intellectual climate of educated England in the early twentieth century, religious belief was widely thought to be outmoded superstition. In 1922, however, Barfield had a first, break-through intimation that the Gospels are true after all. Reflecting on the changing meanings of the word “ruin,” he wrote: Always the individual spirit increases, according to its knowledge, its dreadful consciousness of solitude. Language has done this; but language, which was born in order to permit social relationships between men, is striving still towards that end and consolation. As it grows subtler and subtler, burying in its vaults more and more associations, more and more mind, it becomes to those same spirits a more and more perfect medium of companionship. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’47

“I had the feeling that it was somehow right—‘this is along my line’—without properly knowing why,” to focus on the Logos, Barfield remembered. He pursued his study of language, gradually coming to understand how “Great poetry is the progressive incarnation of life in consciousness,” and as he did so, that same philological research gradually made him certain “‘that the incarnation, and life and death of Christ was at the center of the whole evolutionary process’ of life itself.” His connection with Christianity was also nurtured by sacred music, especially the music of Bach and Handel, by the Eucharist service of the Church of England, and by the Gospels, especially the Gospel according to John; through them, the tenderness of Christianity as well as its truth made an irresistible impression on his mind and heart. By

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1925 he was a convinced Christian, although he did not formally join the Anglican church until 1949.48 Barfield was introduced to anthroposophy at the same time that the truth and grace of the Christian “good news” were dawning on him, and in fact, Barfield joined the Anthroposophical Society because of Steiner’s Christcentered outlook. As we have seen, Steiner’s method of knowledge appealed to him because of its practicality and grounding in clear, wide-awake thinking; then, “when I came to Christianity as Mystical Fact, I realized that [the Incarnation] was central to his whole vision of the evolution of consciousness . . . So I became an avowed anthroposophist. Mere honesty demanded as much—even though because of my wife’s very different reaction, it nearly broke up our marriage.”49 Maud Barfield, who was a devout High Church Anglican, did indeed oppose Steiner’s views on Christianity, which for many years she considered horrifyingly inaccurate and even in some respects heretical; late in her life, however, she applied to join the Anthroposophical Society herself. Like Lewis and Barfield, Harwood was a deeply religious man. He was more involved than Barfield in organized religion, so much so that he cotranslated the liturgy of his church—The Christian Community, a Movement for Religious Renewal—from German into English. Harwood’s wife Daphne, whom Lewis thoroughly liked and respected, was also a Christian. For these reasons, Lewis discussed anthroposophical ideas about Christianity with the Harwoods as well as with Barfield. Lewis disagreed with the anthroposophical approach to Christianity, both before and after his conversion, and although he modified his objections, he never withdrew them. Writing to Daphne Harwood in March 1933, he said: I am glad you never read my Summa [a “Great War” document he addressed to Barfield in November, 1928], for all that is dead as mutton to me now: and the points chiefly at issue between the Anthroposophists and me then were precisely the points on which anthroposophy is certainly right—i.e. the claim that it is possible for man, here and now, in the phenomenal world, to have commerce with the world beyond—which is what I was denying. The present difference between us is quite other. The only thing that I now wd. object eagerly to [in] anthroposophy is that I don’t think it can say ‘I believe in one God the Father Almighty.’50

Commenting on this point, Cecil Harwood later wrote: “The Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is as vital to anthroposophy as it is to the Athanasian Creed. But it would seem that the immense importance attached to the ‘Mystery of Golgotha’ in anthroposophy, not only for the individual human soul but also for the whole evolution of the world . . . seemed to him to obliterate rather than enhance the importance of the Father.” In addition

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to thinking that his anthroposophical friends placed too much emphasis on Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, Lewis rejected the anthroposophical concept of what the Incarnation involved, in particular the “idea of Christ as suffering from the mere fact of being in the body,” and also the idea of Christ as a member of the angelic hierarchies, as he wrote in a letter to Barfield in 1940.51 Lewis’s most fundamental objection to anthroposophy concerned the relation between the Creator and His creation. He wrote to Daphne Harwood in 1942, “I don’t think the conception of creatureliness is part of your philosophy at all, and that your system is anthropocentric. That’s the ‘great divide.’ ” Barfield has explained that after his conversion Lewis’s view was that “Human beings were created by God and they were entirely other than God. I mean there was no real unity between them and you’ll find emphasized over and over again in his theological writings this complete dichotomy between the creature and the creator.”52 The anthroposophical view is quite different. In Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien, R. J. Reilly notes that whereas Lewis’s position emphasizes God’s transcendence, Barfield’s necessarily emphasizes the immanence of God in man, and involves, for a Christian, the doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption . . . The historical Incarnation is the turning point in time, the moment at which God’s ineffable consciousness of Himself (through the agency of Christ) becomes partially knowable to man, by means of the imagination. As man becomes more and more self-conscious, able to probe ever deeper into his own unconscious mind, he is able to participate ever more consciously in his relationship with God (again, through the agency of Christ, or grace). This progressive self-consciousness, the actuating of the potential matter of the unconscious mind, is the redemptive process.53

Despite their serious differences concerning Christian doctrine, Lewis and his athroposophical friends found that there was “quite a lot for us to agree on as against nearly the whole contemporary world!” as Lewis wrote to Daphne Harwood.54 Indeed, Barfield directly helped Lewis to live his Christian values, for it was Barfield, in his role as Lewis’s attorney, who found a way for Lewis to practice the thorough-going Christian charity that was vitally important to him, without incurring tax penalties for his generosity. William Griffin points out that this was a complicated legal undertaking and required complete mutual understanding and trust: There would have to be a draft of covenant by which Lewis covenanted to pay to Barfield and Barfield, Solicitors, all royalties. There would have to be a trust deed by which Barfield and Barfield declared that it would hold in trust money gotten from Lewis under the deed of covenant, and would use, firstly, to pay the costs of such trust deed, and, secondly, to apply it to such charitable purposes as Lewis might from time

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to time direct. That was precisely what Lewis wanted; he named it the Agape Fund. Barfield then made arrangements with Lewis’s bank concerning tax withholdings from his account; then he opened an account for the trust; finally he was ready to write checks for Lewis’s charities and send them off with gracious letters.55

Barfield continued to administer the Agape (or Agapony) Fund until 1968, 5 years after Lewis’s death, when the moneys had all been disbursed. And with Harwood, he served as executor of Lewis’s will and trustee of his estate. Barfield thought that the three decades from 1930 until his retirement from Barfield and Barfield in 1959 were “in some ways . . . the best of all” in his friendship with Lewis. “My move to London and into captivity meant only the substitution of a regular termly visit to Oxford for the older, more casual and more frequent intercourse. It became by custom a long weekend, with Friday night in his rooms at Magdalen, and Saturday afternoon and Sunday at the Kilns, in Headington Quarry, his private home.”56 During these visits, they took long walks and read and discussed great literature, with special focus on Dante and Homer. When, as occasionally happened, Barfield visited Oxford on a Thursday evening, he and Lewis zestfully participated in the Inklings’ gatherings; reporting on one of those evenings, J. R. R. Tolkien told his son Christopher that “O.B. is the only man who can tackle C.S.L., making him define everything, and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguos.”57 Sometimes Lewis met Barfield in London, for instance to attend performances of Wagner’s operas, which Lewis dearly loved. On one glorious occasion, Lewis and the Barfields took a Thames cruise together. In addition to visiting each other, Lewis and Barfield stayed in close touch through their shared attention to the Agape Fund, their correspondence, and their writings. Despite the considerable demands of their professional and familial responsibilities, they continued to write on scholarly and spiritual topics, and to send their manuscripts to each other for comment and advice. One of the most important of these writings is The Allegory of Love, Lewis’s first major scholarly book, which was published in 1936. The book’s dedication, “To Owen Barfield, wisest and best of my unofficial teachers,” gracefully reciprocates Poetic Diction’s dedication—“To Clive Hamilton [Lewis’s pen name]: Opposition is true friendship”—and it points to the friends’ enduring mutual respect, gratitude, and delight in learning from each other, as well. This spirit of mutuality is strikingly evident in several short pieces that Lewis and Barfield wrote during those years. For example, both men wrote powerfully reasoned, eloquent essays about threats to humanness that they both perceived in twentieth-century culture; Barfield especially admired the eloquence and powerful reasoning of the three Riddell Lectures that Lewis gave in 1943, later published as The Abolition of Man, and thought it was one of the best of all

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Lewis’s writings.58 They also wrote many thoughtful pieces about language and its connections to culture; one of these essays, Barfield’s “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction,” so impressed Lewis when he first saw it in 1939 that he included it in the volume of Essays Presented to Charles Williams, which he edited in 1947. Moreover, the friends continued to sharpen and deepen each other’s thinking, as can be seen in Barfield’s “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy” (1934), which is substantially based in what he learned through reading and discussing Dante with Lewis in the early 1930s. Reciprocally, Lewis’s reflections on Barfield’s “The Form of Hamlet” (1931) helped to inform his 1942 lecture to the British Academy on “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” The vitality of their friendship also resonates in the imaginative writings that Lewis and Barfield composed in the 1930s and 1940s. Throughout the period, each of them wrote numerous short lyric poems that they promptly shared with each other. Lewis’s “chief enjoyment lay in the writing of poetry,” Hooper observes, adding that “most of Lewis’s prose came from his head almost exactly as it appears on the printed page, with only an occasional word being changed. It was not like this with his poetry. They went through endless revisions, the best examples of which are the religious lyrics of 1930 that he was still revising up to the time he died.”59 Barfield, too, invested much care in the love sonnets, light “Betty” verses, religious and other poems that he wrote during those years. Additionally, each of them wrote sharply focused satiric fiction, the “Solomon Oudel” pieces (1934 and 1937) by Barfield and The Screwtape Letters (1941–1942) by Lewis. Barfield’s magnificent verse drama Orpheus (1938) was composed at Lewis’s suggestion and with his thoughtful editorial advice. Multiple significant references to Barfield’s ideas and even to Barfield himself are embedded in the trilogy of science fiction novels that Lewis wrote during those decades. During that same period Barfield composed another long poem, “Riders on Pegasus,” which imaginatively portrays two contrasting aspects of Lewis’s personality. In 1948, Lewis began work on the first of the Narnia books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which he dedicated to his godchild, Lucy Barfield, the adopted daughter of Maud and Owen. A year later, Barfield wrote This Ever Diverse Pair, in which Lewis is appreciatively characterized as the gifted and warm-hearted Ramsden (a play on “Ransom,” the name of the central character in Lewis’s science fiction trilogy). The joy and wit with which Lewis and Barfield supported each other throughout even the grim years of the Great Depression and the Second World War permeate the three works they composed collaboratively. “Abecedarium Philosophicum” (1933) ingeniously characterizes major philosophical figures, movements, and concepts from “a to z” in rhymed couplets. A Cretaceous

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Perambulator, which Barfield and Harwood wrote with Lewis in 1936, parodies school examination questions and schoolchildren’s compositional style. And Mark vs. Tristram (1947) is a fanciful legal correspondence inspired by Lewis’s comment, in his review of a new edition of Malory’s Arthurian stories, that it would be interesting to “imagine the life of Sir Tristram as it would be presented to us by King Mark’s solicitors.”60 The friends also shared excruciating disappointments. In 1951, Barfield was one of the three guests at the dinner party that Lewis and his brother had organized for the night when Oxford’s new Poetry Chair was to be elected, and as biographer A. N. Wilson notes, “When the news came that Jack had been defeated, the supporters were more dashed than their candidate.”61 A similar moment occurred three years later, when Lewis, then preparing to take up his new position at Cambridge University, proposed Barfield as his successor on the Oxford faculty; Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas tell us that “the Appointments Committee had approved the nomination. The invitations had already been sent out for the party celebrating his election when the news came that he had been blackballed. The party was held nevertheless.”62 Although those particular academic hopes were not realized, the 1950s were a time of mostly positive change and tremendous productivity for both men. Helen Joy Davidman Gresham and her sons came into Lewis’s life and heart then. Oxford University’s Clarendon Press published Lewis’s monumental scholarly book, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), a project to which he had devoted many years. During the 1950s he also completed the Narnia series (1950–1954) and wrote his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), and Till We Have Faces (1956), which he and Barfield agreed was his finest work of fiction,63 as well as a great many other pieces. He wrote and delivered a new series of lectures at his new workplace, Cambridge University, as well. For Barfield, the decade brought a welcome lightening of his legal practice’s workload as he moved toward retirement. He spent many of his newly free hours in the British Museum, reading voraciously. The book that resulted from these researches, Saving the Appearances (1957), is widely considered his masterpiece. An in-depth study of the evolution of consciousness, Saving the Appearances enlarges and deepens the lines of inquiry that Barfield began in History in English Words and Poetic Diction. Five years before Saving the Appearances was published, Poetic Diction was reissued in a second edition with a substantial new preface by Barfield, analyzing and critiquing leading elements of twentieth-century literary criticism and English poetry, and reaffirming the value of the imagination. The 1952 preface ends on a warmly personal note, “in celebration of nearly half a lifetime’s priceless friendship” with Lewis.64

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“I stick to Owen’s view,” Lewis says in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964), referring to one of the key arguments advanced in Saving the Appearances.65 Much of what Lewis wrote in the last few years of his life highlights ideas and values that he and Barfield wholeheartedly shared throughout their long friendship. One of those was the tremendous significance they both found in friendship. The Four Loves (1960), which praises true friendship as “the sort of love one can imagine between angels,”66 vividly describes “the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day’s walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk.”67 The “golden” atmosphere of Lewis’s and Barfield’s friendship also is suggested in Worlds Apart (1963), Barfield’s brilliant depiction of a kind of walking tour of the modern intellectual landscape. The book presents an imaginary extended conversation between eight specialists in diverse fields, who meet in the hope of arriving at a genuinely interdisciplinary understanding. Professor Hunter, one of the participants in the conversation, is Barfield’s affectionate fictional version of Lewis; even in his name, Hunter the character evokes the questing spirit, utter dedication to the truth, and purposefulness that Barfield admired in Lewis the man. The conversational circle also includes Burgeon, who is like Barfield “a lawyer with an interest in philology,” and Sanderson, a “retired schoolmaster,” with Harwood’s thoughtful commitment to anthroposophy. Even when medical problems kept him largely home-bound, Lewis retained his quintessential joy in being with close friends. Barfield and Harwood were among those who visited him in Oxford; as Barfield later said, during those visits all three were conscious of being enfolded by the “[a]ffection mellowed by the years” that Lewis had described in The Four Loves.68 Lewis also continued to relish the life of the mind, as is evident in his response to Worlds Apart, both in manuscript and again when it was published. On October 21, 1963, he wrote to Barfield, “I think I can say that in sheer pleasure content Worlds Apart and the Iliad have been the high lights of this summer. As before, the difficulty in digesting W. A. comes from this irresistible tendency to wolf it down too quickly.”69 On November 22, 1963, a little more than a month after his note to Barfield, Lewis quietly died at the Kilns, his home. Barfield and Harwood were among the small group of family and friends who attended the funeral that was held four days later in Headington Quarry Church. Sayer, who also was there, remembered that “A lighted church candle was placed on the coffin, and its flame did not flicker. For more than one of us, that clear, bright candle flame seemed to symbolize Jack.”70 The following year, Barfield made what would turn out to be the first of many visits to North America, where he served

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as visiting professor at several college campuses across the continent. During these visits he often spoke about the luminous intelligence, inextinguishable sense of the comic, and radiant goodwill which made Lewis “the absolutely unforgettable friend.”71 NOTES 1. Owen Barfield, “Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language,” Towards 1(2) (1978), 3. 2. Ibid. 3. Owen Barfield, Preface in The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer, ed. Bruce L. Edwards (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 2. 4. A. C. Harwood, The Voice of Cecil Harwood, ed. Owen Barfield (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979), 285. 5. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 572. 6. Owen Barfield, “Prologue to Songs and Dances of Many Lands,” in Maisie Bradford and Evelyn Bradford, Musical Adventures in Cornwall (London: Macdonald, 1965), 44. 7. C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1921–1927, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 28. 8. Ibid., 30. 9. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 199. 10. C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 39. 11. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Good News Publishers, 1994), 207; C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 201. 12. C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 57, 59; Barfield, “Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language,” 3. 13. Barfield, “Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language,” 5. 14. Astrid Diener, The Role of Imagination in Culture and Society: Owen Barfield’s Early Work (Cambridge, MA: Galda & Wilch, 2002), 159. 15. C. S. Lewis, Narrative Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 1969), 4; C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 39–40, 42, 53, 255, 275, 278. 16. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 260–261; C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 200; Owen Barfield, “Youth,” in “Alfred Cecil Harwood: January 5, 1898—December 22, 1975,” Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, Supplement to Members’ News Sheet (February 1976), 2; Owen Barfield, untitled address, in “Report of the Annual General Meeting,” Anthroposophical Movement 51(3) (1974), 9. 17. C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me, 254; C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 206.

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18. Owen Barfield, interview by Astrid Diener, “An Interview with Owen Barfield: Poetic Diction—Between Conception and Publication,” Mythlore 20(4) (1995), 17. 19. Owen Barfield, letter to the editor, The New Age: A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art 34 (1924), 250. 20. Crispian Villeneuve, Rudolf Steiner in Great Britain: A Documentation of His Ten Visits, Volume 2, 1922–1925 (Forest Row, England: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2004), 768, 806–807. 21. This is the title of Owen Barfield’s pamphlet, Danger, Ugliness and Waste (To All Artists and Men of Letters) (London: Credit Research Library, [1924]). 22. Owen Barfield, “C. S. Lewis,” in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 4. 23. Owen Barfield, interview by Gary Lachman, “One Man’s Century: Visiting Owen Barfield,” Gnosis 40 (Summer, 1996), 8. 24. Owen Barfield, History in English Words (London: Methuen, 1926), 6. 25. David Lavery, “Owen Barfield: A Reader’s Guide,” in Seven: An AngloAmerican Literary Review 15 (1998), 99; Barfield, History in English Words, 74, 155; Paul Leopold, “Fighting ‘Verbicide’ and Sounding Old-Fashioned: Some Notes on Lewis’s Use of Words,” in The Taste of the Pineapple, 120. 26. Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis’ “Great War” with Owen Barfield, new ed. (Cumbria, England: Ink Books, 2002), 15–16. 27. Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 30; Owen Barfield, interview by G. B. Tennyson, Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, VHS, produced and narrated by G. B. Tennyson (Encino, CA: OwenArts, 1996). 28. Barfield, “One Man’s Century: Visiting Owen Barfield.” 29. Ibid., “Metaphor,” New Statesman 26 (1926), 709; Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), 56. 30. Barfield, Poetic Diction, 50. 31. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1, Family Letters, 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 762; C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 200. 32. Owen Barfield, “Romanticism and Anthroposophy,” Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science 1(1) (1926), 124; C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1, 671. 33. Barfield, “An Interview with Owen Barfield.” 34. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 209; 228–229. 35. Ibid., 215; Owen Barfield, interview by Shirley Sugerman, “A Conversation with Owen Barfield,” by Shirley Sugerman, in Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, ed. Shirley Sugerman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 22. 36. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 34. Also see Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 5.

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37. Owen Barfield, interview by Clifford Monks, “Reflections on C. S. Lewis, S. T. Coleridge, and R. Steiner: An Interview with Owen Barfield,” Towards 2(6) (1985), 6. 38. Quoted in Rand Kuhl, “Owen Barfield in Southern California,” Mythlore 1(4) (1969), 10. 39. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 156. 40. Ibid., 703. 41. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, rev. and exp. ed. (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 108; Owen Barfield, “Death” (unpublished, photocopy in the author’s possession), 11; C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 650; Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 300. 42. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 184. 43. W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), 73. 44. Owen Barfield, “A Conversation with Owen Barfield,” 9. 45. Owen Barfield, “C. S. Lewis,” in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 5; C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1, 836. 46. Owen Barfield, interview by Elmar Schenkel, “Interview mit Owen Barfield,” Inklings–Jahrbuch 11 (1993), 26. 47. Owen Barfield, “Ruin,” London Mercury 7 (December 1922), 170. 48. Owen Barfield, “A Conversation with Owen Barfield,” 10; Barfield, Poetic Diction, 203; Marjorie Lamp Mead, “Afterword: Owen Barfield: A Biographical Note,” in Owen Barfield The Silver Trumpet (Longmont, CO: Bookmakers Guild, 1986), 120. 49. Owen Barfield, “Interview mit Owen Barfield,” 26. 50. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 107–108 and 420. 51. A. C. Harwood, “About Anthroposophy,” in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como, new ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 28; C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 268–269. 52. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 514; Barfield, “A Conversation with Owen Barfield,” 22. 53. R. J. Reilly, Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 212–213. 54. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 108. 55. William Griffin, Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 208. 56. Owen Barfield, Introduction, in Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), xiii.

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57. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 177. 58. Owen Barfield, interview by G. B. Tennyson, “C. S. Lewis, A Retrospect: A Conversation between Owen Barfield and G. B. Tennyson,” in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletowen, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 146. 59. Walter Hooper, “Introduction,” in The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis, by C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 1994), xv–xvi. 60. William Griffin, Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 271. 61. A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 232. 62. Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas, “Introduction,” in A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield, by Owen Barfield, ed. Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 15. 63. Owen Barfield, “C. S. Lewis,” in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 7. 64. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 38. 65. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), 73. 66. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991), 77. 67. Ibid., 72. 68. Ibid. 69. C. S. Lewis to Owen Barfield, October 21, 1963, unpublished, photocopy in the author’s possession. 70. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Good News Publishers, Crossway, 1994), 411. 71. Owen Barfield, “C. S. Lewis,” in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adey, Lionel. C. S. Lewis’ “Great War” with Owen Barfield. New ed. Cumbria, England: Ink Books, 2002. ———. C. S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. Barfield, Owen. Address (untitled). In “Report of the Annual General Meeting.” Anthroposophical Movement 51(3) (1974): 8–10. ———. A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield. Edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

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———. “C. S. Lewis.” In Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989, 3–16. ———. “The Child and the Giant.” In Owen Barfield: A Waldorf Tribute. Edited by Brien Masters, 16–24. Forest Row, England: Steiner Education, 1998. ———. Danger, Ugliness, and Waste (To All Artists and Men of Letters). London: Credit Research Library [1924]. ———. “Death.” Unpublished. Photocopy in the author’s possession. ———. English People. Unpublished. Photocopy in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. ———. “The Form of Hamlet.” Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science 6(3) (1931): 245–265. Repr. in Romanticism Comes of Age, by Owen Barfield, 65–103. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1944. New and augmented ed., 104–126. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966. ———. History in English Words. London: Methuen, 1926. 2nd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1953. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. New York: Inner Traditions; West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Press; Edinburgh, Floris Books, Floris Classics, 1985. ———. “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy.” Anthroposophical Movement 11(3) (February 22, 1934): 1–8. Repr. in Romanticism Comes of Age, by Owen Barfield, 120–138. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co, 1944. ———. Interview by Astrid Diener. “An Interview with Owen Barfield: Poetic Diction—Between Conception and Publication.” By Astrid Diener. Mythlore 20(4) (1995): 14–19. ———. Interview by Clifford Monks. “Reflections on C. S. Lewis, S. T. Coleridge, and R. Steiner: An Interview with Owen Barfield.” Towards 2(6) (1985): 6–3. 39. ———. Interview by Elmar Schenkel. “Interview mit Owen Barfield.” By Elmar ¨ Schenkel. Inklings: Jahrbuch f¨ur Literatur und Asthetik 11 (1993): 23–38. ———. Interview by G. B. Tennyson. “C. S. Lewis, A Retrospect: A Conversation between Owen Barfield and G. B. Tennyson. In Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989, 138–152. ———. Interview by G. B. Tennyson. Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning. VHS. Produced and narrated by G. B. Tennyson. Encino, CA: OwenArts, 1996. ———. Interview by Gary Lachman. “One Man’s Century: Visiting Owen Barfield.” Gnosis 40 (Summer 1996): 8–10. ———. Interview by Shirley Sugerman. “A Conversation with Owen Barfield.” In Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity. Edited by Shirley Sugerman, 3–28. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976. ———. Introduction. In Light on C. S. Lewis. Edited by Jocelyn Gibb. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965, ix–xxi. ——— [Solomon Oudel, pseud.]. “Introductory.” Anthroposophical Movement 11(14) (1934): 124–126.

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———. Letter to the editor. The New Age: A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art 34 (1924): 250–251. ——— [Solomon Oudel, pseud.]. “A Letter to the Editor and The Transition to the Consciousness–Soul in English Folk Tradition.” Anthroposophical Movement 14(12) (1937): 187–190. ———. “Metaphor.” New Statesman 26 (1926): 708–710. ———. “Nine Poems.” London Mercury 5 (July 1922): 326–329. ———. Orpheus: A Poetic Drama. Edited by John C. Ulreich, Jr. West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1983. ———. Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. ———. “Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language.” Towards 1(2) (1978): 1, 3–7; 1, no. 3 (1978): 13–15. ———. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928. 2nd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. 3rd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. ———. “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Edited by C. S. Lewis. London: Oxford University Press, 1947, 106– 127. ———. Preface in The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. Edited by Bruce L. Edwards. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988, 1–2. ———. “Prologue to Songs and Dances of the World.” In Musical Adventures in Cornwall, by Maisie and Evelyn Radford, 44. Dawlish, England: David and Charles; London: Macdonald, 1965. ——— [Solomon Oudel, pseud.]. “Reminiscences.” Anthroposophical Movement 11(19/20) (1934): 164–166. ———. “Riders on Pegasus.” Unpublished. Photocopy in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. ———. “The Rose on the Ash–Heap.” In A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield, by Owen Barfield. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 97–127. ———. “Ruin.” London Mercury 7 (December 1922): 164–170. ———. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965. 2nd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. ———. “Seven Letters.” The Weekly Westminster Gazette, new series no. 3 (March 4, 1922): 16. ———. The Silver Trumpet. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968. Longmont, CO: Bookmakers Guild, 1986. ——— [G. A. L. Burgeon, pseud.]. This Ever Diverse Pair. London: Victor Gollancz, 1950.

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———. Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960’s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh. London: Grant Richards, 1903. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Diener, Astrid. The Role of Imagination in Culture and Society: Owen Barfield’s Early Work. Glienecke, Germany: Galda + Wilch, 2002. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Rev. and exp. ed. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Griffin, William. Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986. Harwood, A. C. “About Anthroposophy.” In C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. Edited by James T. Como, 25–30. New York: Macmillan, 1979. ———. The Voice of Cecil Harwood. Edited by Owen Barfield. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. London and New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. Introduction. The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, Fount, 1994, ix–xxi. Hunter, Jeanne Clayton and Thomas Kranidas. Introduction. In Owen Barfield A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield. Edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 1–17. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Kuhl, Rand. “Owen Barfield in Southern California.” Mythlore 1(4) (1969): 8–10. Lavery, David. “Owen Barfield: A Reader’s Guide.” Seven: An Anglo–American Literary Review 15 (1998): 97–112. Leopold, Paul. “Fighting ‘Verbicide’ and Sounding Old-Fashioned: Some Notes on Lewis’s Use of Words.” In The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. Edited by Bruce L. Edwards. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988, 110–127. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man: or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of School. Riddell Memorial Lectures, Fifteenth Series. London: Oxford University Press, 1943. ———. All My Road before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1921–1927. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1996. ———. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. ———. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1, Family Letters, 1905–1931. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

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———. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. Dymer. London: J. M. Dent, 1926. ———. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama. Vol. 3 of The Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. ———. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960. ———. “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” Annual Shakespeare Lecture, 1942. Proceedings of the British Academy 28. London: Oxford University Press, 1942. ———. The Horse and His Boy. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954. ——— [Clive Hamilton, pseud.]. “Joy.” The Beacon, 3 (May 1924): 444–445. Reprinted in C. S. Lewis, The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis, Edited by Walter Hooper, 243–244. London: HarperCollins, 1994. ———. The Last Battle: A Story for Children. London: The Bodley Head, 1956. ———. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. London: Geoffrey Bles; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950. ———. The Magician’s Nephew. London: The Bodley Head, 1955. ———. Narrative Poems. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 1961. ———. Out of the Silent Planet. London: The Bodley Head, 1938. ———. Perelandra. London: The Bodley Head, 1943. ———. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. London: J. M. Dent, 1933. 2nd ed. London: Sheed and Ward, 1935. ———. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1951. ———. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. ———. The Silver Chair. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953. ———. [Clive Hamilton, pseud.]. Spirits in Bondage. London: Heinemann, 1919. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956. ———. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-tale for Grown-ups. London: The Bodley Head, 1945. ———. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956. ———. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. ———, ed. Essays Presented to Charles Williams. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. L[ewis], C. S. and A[rthur] O[wen] B[arfield]. “Abecedarium Philosophicum.” Oxford Magazine 52 (November 30, 1933): 298. Lewis, C. S. and Owen Barfield. A Cretaceous Perambulator (The Re–examination of ). Edited by Walter Hooper. Oxford: Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society, 1983.

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———. Mark vs. Tristram: Correspondence between C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge, MA: Lowell House Printers, 1967. Lewis, W. H. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982. Mead, Marjorie Lamp. “Afterword: Owen Barfield: A Biographical Note.” In Owen Barfield, The Silver Trumpet, 117–123. Longmont, CO: Bookmakers Guild, 1986. Reilly, R. J. Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Good News Publishers, 1994. Steiner, Rudolf. Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity. 2nd English ed., rev. Translation revised by Charles Davy and Adam Bittleston. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972. ———. How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation. Translated by Christopher Bamford. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1994. ———. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Philosophy of Freedom. Rev.ed. Revised translation by Rita Stebbing. Bristol, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1992. Villeneuve, Crispian. Rudolf Steiner in Great Britain: A Documentation of His Ten Visits. Volume 2, 1922–1925. Forest Row, England: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2004. Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1990.

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C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien: Friends and Mutual Mentors Scott Calhoun

In this first decade of the twenty-first century, interest in the imaginative literature of Clive Staples Lewis and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien—two men from a different time who wrote, ostensibly, about different worlds—is greater than ever before. Both Lewis and Tolkien were born near the end of the nineteenthcentury and died two-thirds of the way through the twentieth-century, but now, well over half a century after they published their first literary work, they are at the height of their fame. They would be pleased with their success and each would certainly want to congratulate the other for his achievements. Friends would want to do that, and Lewis and Tolkien were friends first to last. They shared an interest in the outdoors, in taking adventuresome walks in the countryside, in books, and in the languages and tales of civilizations of long ago. They shared an interest in staying unaffected as much as possible by those developments in the twentieth century heralded as “progress.” They liked a good smoke, a good riddle, a good laugh, a good song, and a good pint of beer in a comfortable pub. They were both Christians, though their practice of their faith and the influence it had on their writing produced some pronounced differences. They were careful critics of each other’s work as well, and they encouraged each other to write stories first to please themselves and then for those who liked what they liked. When we read their literature, we can rightly conclude that what Lewis and Tolkien liked in a story was a

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wonderfully populated world, a richly detailed landscape, intellectually stimulating characters, and adventuresome conflicts over nothing less than the highest moral or heroic codes principles. Both Oxford dons received inspiration from the languages literatures of pre-Renaissance worlds, and sought to write stories that would inspire others by captivating the imagination and illuminating the human heart. These were the kinds of stories they wanted to read; they were fans of the kinds of stories that could do this; and recent polls and sales figures testify that many readers are fans of the particular way in which Lewis and Tolkien went about creating these kinds of stories. When Waterstone’s, the largest retail bookseller in the United Kingdom, joined with the BBC’s Book Choice program and polled over 25,000 people in 1996 for the public’s choice of the top one hundred books of the century, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was hailed as number one, ahead of other top ten books such as George Orwell’s 1984 (#2) and Animal Farm (#3), James Joyce’s Ulysses (#4), Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (#7), and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (#9). Tolkien’s The Hobbit placed at number nineteen on the same list, and C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe nearly made the top twenty, coming in at twenty-one. Waterstone’s conducted a similar poll of favorite children’s books of the century and again, Lewis and Tolkien placed very high. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe rose to third, with The Hobbit at fifth and The Lord of the Rings at seventeenth. More surveys conducted in the late 1990s by different news outlets and book societies in the United Kingdom came up with the same results each time: The Lord of the Rings was readers’ number one choice for book of the century. The Folio Society, to note one example of another poll, reported Tolkien’s epic work as number one after asking its fifty thousand members for their ten favorite books not of just the century, but of all time.1 Many journalists and critics throughout England disagreed with the results, and surely many readers do too. Granted, they are hardly scientific polls (though, it is hard to think of how a poll for determining what the best book is in any category could be scientific). But it is telling that popular polls such as these placed Lewis and Tolkien so near the top of the lists. American’s are fans of Lewis and Tolkien, too. The on-line bookseller Amazon.com surveyed customers in 1999 and reported The Lord of the Rings as the greatest book of the millennium.2 And, of course, the recent cinematic success of both authors’ well-loved stories continues to keep Lewis and Tolkien’s popularity aloft. Popularity is something each had a taste of while alive. By the time Lewis published Mere Christianity in 1952, he was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The 1940s were, for Lewis, a decade of nearly constant writing, speaking, and publishing. Apart from The Chronicles of Narnia, nearly all of Lewis’s best known books of fiction and Christian

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apologetics were published in the 1940s, and the twenty-five wartime talks for the BBC radio, which would become Mere Christianity, were delivered in 1941. Noticing how popular this Oxford professor had become, Time magazine chose Lewis for the subject of their September 8, 1947, cover story, “Don v. Devil,” and placed his portrait on the cover over the caption “His Heresy: Christianity.” Though Tolkien was a highly esteemed professor of English language and literature and though his 1937 publication of The Hobbit was well-received, he was still relatively unknown as a writer of popular fiction when he published The Lord of the Rings in 1954–1955. Soon after, however, all that changed. For the remainder of the twentieth-century, his stature grew, as reader after reader discovered that they, too, liked the kinds of stories that Tolkien and Lewis liked. Taking a cue from the Waterstone and Amazon polls, Tom Shippey’s published his biography of Tolkien in 2000 with the title of J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. If Tolkien is, by popular consensus, the author of the best book of the century, it would stand to reason that Lewis is Christian Apologist of the Century, if based on nothing else than numbers of copies sold of all of his works, which are all still in print. The titles and accolades would most likely produce a resoundingly dismissive hrrumpf from both men, as they thought little of fame and the cult of celebrity. They would be delighted, however, to know that millions more readers than they ever knew of got from their stories great literary pleasure and many occasions for reflecting on the human condition, albeit by reading about the struggles of hobbits, elves, dwarfs, and inhabitants of other planets. For Lewis and Tolkien said as much about their gratitude when answering the voluminous amount of fan mail they received. Essentially, Lewis and Tolkien discovered in their youth that mythologies had a certain power over them. Later in life, they discovered that they were not alone in the depth of their love for myth. Their belief in myth’s ability to convey facts, and truth, about the world solidified their friendship. A study of Lewis and Tolkien as friends, readers, and storytellers, is really the study of how two people, each enchanted the realm of myth and the mythopoeic enterprise—that is, the business of myth making—were developing along similar personal and professional paths in life and fortuitously met each other at a critical moment in their careers. For Lewis, the meeting was of extreme importance for his faith as well. Lewis would surely have been a prolific writer regardless of Tolkien’s influence in his life, but the influence of Christianity on his private and professional life was no doubt helped along by Tolkien. Had Tolkien not met Lewis, The Lord of the Rings most likely would have at best remained unfinished (and thus unpublished) at Tolkien’s’ death, possibly in a state of incoherency due to his tendency to endlessly revise and expand his epic tale. At worst, Tolkien might have abandoned in the early stages

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writing the story altogether, for want of encouragement that it was any good. Certainly, without this friendship that lasted nearly 40 years, about twentyfive of which were spent mentoring each other in the craft of storytelling, their influence on the readers of twentieth and twenty-first century literature would be considerably less than the chart-topping success they now have. PATHS PREPARED TO CROSS In 1926, at an afternoon tea at Merton College, Oxford University, Lewis and Tolkien first spoke with one another. It was likely the first time they ever met. For the 25 years prior to this meeting, their lives were like trains traveling separate tracks but through similar scenery and through similarly inclement weather, headed ultimately toward the same destination. The tracks for each train eventually merged that afternoon in 1926 at Merton College, but there was no catastrophic collision. Instead, Lewis and Tolkien linked with each other and began to travel the same track, though with some sensible caution at first. In years to come, however, the connection grew stronger, energizing each man’s creative abilities and adding a momentum to their productivity greater than would have ever been possible if either had worked solely under his own power. When thinking about what became of them down the road, it makes the ordinariness of their initial meeting and conversation all the more interesting. Lewis records in his dairy on that day, Tuesday, May 11, nothing that would foretell of forming of a great alliance for the sake of writing the kind of stories that would please them and eventually millions of readers. On the contrary, it would seem that Lewis was prepared to suffer Tolkien a little as they worked together. They talked about the business of reforming the curriculum for the Oxford English School and shared their ideas on the value of language and literature. Tolkien, already convinced at the beginning of his career that languages were “the real thing”—that is, he thought the study of philology was the proper hub for the subjects of the English Syllabus—apparently touched a nerve in Lewis when he shared his belief that “all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty.”3 That evening after they met, Lewis described Tolkien as “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap” who dismissed literature for languages, but there was “no harm in him, only needs a smack or so.”4 It was not a foregone conclusion that Lewis and Tolkien would warm to each other after their initial tea-time talk. They surely could work as collaborators on reforming the school’s English syllabus, but they could have easily let their differences keep a professional acquaintance from turning into a lasting friendship of the kind in which one takes an interest in the other beyond what

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the duties of a job and polite society dictate. Lewis was Irish, born in Belfast, and Tolkien was English, born in South Africa and then raised in Birmingham, England. In matters of faith, Lewis was raised an Ulster Protestant, was then an atheist for a time as a young man then became an Anglican at age thirtythree. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic his entire life, and though he played a significant role in Lewis’s conversion, his Catholicism wasn’t fully appealing to Lewis. In their attitude toward their work of writing, Tolkien would labor over manuscripts, making multiple revisions to them, while Lewis seemed to have his drafts at the publisher as soon as he put his pen down. Oddly enough, their approach to friendship differed too. Tolkien could be quite guarded in his relationships and was a bit possessive with his friends, while Lewis engaged others easily, was quick to add new friends to his circle and didn’t seem to mind sharing his acquaintances with others. Without these differences, though, Lewis and Tolkien would most likely have quickly grown bored with each other. Each man desired a life of mental stimulation—they were university professors, after all—and Lewis, especially, seemed to relish a certain amount of good-natured intellectual jousts amongst friends. But what became apparent in subsequent years was their shared depth of interest in not only languages but in the stories behind them and because of them. They shared something stronger than an academic curiosity in myths and fairy-tales: for both Lewis and Tolkien, sustaining a sense of well-being in life had included, up to this point, regular encounters with the age-old attempts of humans to grasp by linguistic means, what is beyond the visible world. In short, each one had long ago fallen under the spell of words and had been carried by them into regions of “otherness.” Interestingly, they both experienced similarly tragic events in their youths and young manhoods that seem to have had, perhaps not coincidentally, made the world of literature all that more important for their well-being. For about the first 10 years of Lewis’s life, his childhood was mostly nothing but “good parents, good food, and a garden . . . to play in”5 with his brother, Warren, who was older by three years. He recounts in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that only the occasional dream about a ghost or terrifying insect interrupted his otherwise peaceful existence. Belfast was a perfect place for the two young Lewis brothers, biographer George Sayer notes, with the noise and excitement of the shipbuilding yards appealing to both boys, but to Warren especially, and the beautiful green hills surrounding the city appealing to Lewis particularly.6 But the unsanitary setting of an industrial city at the turn of the twentieth century, combined with the frequently damp weather of Belfast and Lewis’s parents’ belief that he had “weak chest,” led to Lewis spending more time playing inside than other boys would have. It was during these years, before Lewis was ten, that he had become immersed in the world of

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literature. Lewis writes that in his childhood home there were what seemed to be endless shelves of books: There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.7

Along with the reading of books, Lewis, like so many children, enjoyed creating worlds where animals talked and had adventures. Sometimes a child participates in these created worlds as acts of fantasy, but often a child’s mind, as was Lewis’s, is given over to representing what is in his imagination or what he encounters first as only words in books. While engaged in his play, Lewis would occasionally encounter a certain feeling of mysterious delight more akin to having a glimpse of something great than to the basic pleasures of idle play. Later in life he would call this sensation Joy, which he defined as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”8 Lewis attributed the quickening of his sensitivity to the presence of Joy to three specific events in his childhood. When he was about three, his brother, Warren, made a toy garden out of some moss in an empty biscuit tin for him and his brother. As an adult, Lewis looked back on that toy garden as being something that sparked in him “the memory of a memory” that guided him toward a longing for a desire to see the commonplace in the world transformed into something “enormous.”9 When reading Squirrel Nutkin as a child, Lewis said he encountered the Idea of Autumn, which again stirred longings and desires in him for something beyond ordinary life, something surprising and of incalculable importance.10 A third encounter with that which was uncommon and just-out-of-reach was what Lewis called experiencing northernness. He had it first when reading the opening lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Drapa, a ballad by the nineteenth-century Norse poet Isaias Tegner: I heard a voice that cried, “Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead!”

Lewis writes: “I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and

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remote)”11 A few years later, Lewis had another experience of Northernness, brought on when seeing an illustrated catalog for Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. He recalls in his autobiography that when coming upon this catalog, “pure Northernness engulfed me [with] a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer . . . I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago.”12 In these reflections on the impression these experiences had on him, Lewis reveals especially attuned his mind was for taking certain images and words and transforming them into entr´ees to realms beyond the literal, physical world. Biographer George Sayer understands these moments of encountering Joy were, for Lewis, on the level of supreme significance: “the most important experiences of his childhood, indeed, of his whole life, were not literary. They were mystical experiences of the presence of God . . .”13 It is not uncommon for children to enjoy spending a good deal of time in make-believe worlds, but it seems that for Lewis, the intensity of these moments of revelation that he experienced as a child secured in him a desire to stay connected to otherworlds for the remainder of his life. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, “it will be clear that at this time—at the age of six, seven, and eight—I was living almost entirely in my imagination,” and while he matured and did not stay “almost entirely” in his imagination as an adult, when looking back on those years he would nonetheless claim “that the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else.”14 His idyllic childhood came to an end at age nine when his mother, Flora Hamilton Lewis, died of cancer in 1908. A disturbing season in Lewis’s life commenced with her death, which would last for many years. “All settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life,”15 Lewis wrote. A month after Flora’s death, Lewis’s father, Albert, sent him to join his older brother at Wynyard, a boarding school near London. Lewis left Wynyard, a poorly managed school under the strict control of a headmaster who, after Lewis left, was declared insane, for another school, and then for another. Each school took an increasingly hard toll on Lewis, both emotionally and physically. Eventually, Lewis lived and studied in much better conditions as the only student in the home of the intellectually exacting tutor William T. Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis came to call “The Great Knock.” Though Lewis flourished academically, no doubt prepared to do so by his voracious appetite for books as a child, he would still say in his autobiography that those years following his mother’s death had “much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security.”16 Lewis prevailed academically and earned a scholarship to study at University College, Oxford, in 1917. His studies were suspended, however, when in November of that year he was sent to the front lines of the World War I battle being waged in the Somme Valley, France. Lewis spent time fighting

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in the trenches, left for a while to recover in a hospital from “trench fever” in February 1918, and then returned to the front. During the Battle of Arras, on April 15, 1918, a misguided English shell landed near Lewis, killing an English Sergeant near him and striking Lewis in three places, one of which was close enough to his heart that the piece of metal was never removed. In all, Lewis had been to war for six months and had lost a few friends from his preparatory school days as well as his close friend, Edward “Paddy” Moore, who had been his roommate at Oxford. About a year prior to Lewis’s arrival in the Somme Valley, Tolkien had served for 4 months in the Battle of the Somme, from July to October 1916. Like Lewis, and like thousands of other soldiers, he contracted “trench fever,” but to a severe enough degree that he was sent back to England on November 8, never to return to battle. Tolkien left the war uninjured, but like so many who survived, he suffered the loss of many of his friends. In his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of The Rings, he calls his experience at war “hideous” and mentions that “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”17 Fighting in the Great War was not the only shared experience of Lewis and Tolkien’s, nor was it the only tragic experience. Tolkien’s mother, Mabel Tolkien, died in a coma related to diabetes when he was twelve, thereby leaving him and his brother, Hilary, as orphans. Mabel had been raising her two sons with the help of her sister since the death of her husband, Arthur, when Tolkien was four. To his mother, Tolkien would later in life give the credit for awakening his taste for languages: “My interest in languages was derived solely from my mother . . . [s]he knew German, and gave me my first lessons in it.”18 Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s first biographer, wrote that “her death also had a cementing effect on his study of languages.”19 Lewis had said that when his mother died, the feelings of the “old security” left his life, which gives us some understanding of the profound effect his mother had on his inner-life. Mabel Tolkien had a similarly profound influence on Tolkien, though the effect on his inner-life was to draw him closer, not away from, the security of faith. Later in his life, Tolkien would write of the debt his owed his mother: “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.”20 At age twelve, as an orphan, Tolkien was looked after in Birmingham by an aunt and the parish priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who had for some years already been providing assistance to the family. Father Morgan took on greater responsibilities for Tolkien’s welfare after his mother’s death and saw to it that he continued to receive a formal education. Tolkien had been spared the discomforts of boarding schools in his youth, instead attending King

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Edward’s School, a day-school, in Birmingham. In 1910, he won a modest scholarship to study classics at Exeter College, Oxford, after having failed his first entrance examination for Oxford the year before. Eventually, Tolkien would switch his course of studies at Oxford to the English School and start studying philology, culminating in receiving a First Class (magna cum laude) in English language and literature from Oxford in 1915. Certainly, Tolkien was glad to be back from the war in 1916, reunited with his wife, Edith, in Birmingham, whom he had married just prior to leaving for France. Coming back to Birmingham allowed him to resume pursuing his interests in philology. Professionally, he began working as an editor on volumes for the then in-development Oxford English Dictionary. In a more private sense, being in Birmingham reconnected Tolkien to the place where as a child he came into contact with the world of other languages. Carpenter describes the scene outside Tolkien’s childhood home this way: the railway cutting had grass slopes, and here he discovered flowers and plants. And something else attracted his attention: the curious names on the coal-trucks in the sidings below, odd names which he did not know how to pronounce but which had a strange appeal to him. So it came about that by pondering over Nantyglo, Senghenydd, Blaen-Rhondda, Penrhiwceiber, and Tredegar, he discovered the existence of the Welsh language. Later in childhood he went on a railway journey to Wales, and as the station names flashed past him he knew that here were worlds more appealing to him than any he had yet encountered, a language that was old and yet alive . . . however brief and tantalising the glimpse, he had caught sight of another linguistic world.21

Like Lewis, Tolkien was moved by the words he encountered as well as by the natural world. Not only was Tolkien captivated by the Welsh language, which in turn led to his teaching himself Norse in grade school and then later studying many more languages, he had encounters with the northerness Lewis had written of sensing as a child. Tolkien recounts in his landmark essay, On Fairy Stories, that he was enchanted at an early age by the north: “I had no desire to have either dreams or adventures like Alice [in Wonderland ], and the account of them merely amused me . . . the land of Merlin and Arthur was better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the V¨olsungs, and the prince of dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable.”22 By the age of eighteen, Tolkien decided he would write a cycle of myths of the north, using languages and legends he would invent himself, as a way to staying close to this world that had enthralled him. The pursuit of Northernness, Carpenter suggests, “remained [at] the center of his imaginative life.”23 Academic life at Oxford may have brought Lewis and Tolkien together, but what created a friendship seems to have much more to do with that shared experience of feeling both excitement and consolation when words

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transported them to lands more strange, but somehow less traumatic, than their world at hand. Tolkien explained in On Fairy Stories, that for him, “a real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.”24 It would seem that losing mothers as children and then losing friends in war intensified each man’s convictions that Joy, if it were to be found, lay in lands elsewhere. Lewis recognized in himself that when he was experiencing Northernness, he was being taken over by what was “essentially a desire [which] implied the absence of its object.”25 As professors, they were able to pursue, academically, the realms that had captivated them since children. In their personal lives, they had found someone who had been traveling down the same path and who welcomed the presence of a companion for the journey ahead. MENTORS IN MYTHOPOEIA It wasn’t long after their first meeting that Lewis and Tolkien realized the depth of each other’s interest in all things mythic. Between 1926 and 1931, they worked together on Tolkien’s immediate interest in reforming the English school syllabus that was eventually accepted by the school with Lewis’s support. Lewis also began working on his study of the Middle Ages and the use of allegory and the appearance of courtly love in the literature of this period, out of which came his 1935 book, The Allegory of Love. In the background, however, they had been carrying on a conversation about the nature of myth and its uses. Both understood myth as a creative attempt to explain the world as we see and sense it, and both believed myth could point to truths. Myth did not create truth, but rather, as it typically employed the unusual and fantastic in the service of its story, it presented in a fresh-way truths we had become dulled to perceiving in our world. When myth did this, Lewis and Tolkien agreed that myth was acting as an aid to recovering what was lost or forgotten. Myth also brought its readers in touch with the numinous, or that which is awe-inspiring, “other,” and existing in a sort of spiritual dimension beyond human reality. For Lewis and Tolkien, it was the otherness of Northernness that they enjoyed so much that myth frequently brought them in touch with. Tolkien had also long believed that the ability to make myths, or engage in mythopoeia, was a special gift given to humans above all other created beings. He understood it from the perspective of his Christian faith as one of the marks people bore of being made in the image of God. In addition to this, Tolkien thought myths were especially effective at conveying moral and spiritual truths, which for Tolkien meant that in order to present these

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kinds of truth, some myths had to have their origins in real events. By the late 1920s, Lewis had thought for some time that myths could help us recover truths, but as far as relaying historical facts they were, as he called them, simply lies, though beautiful lies, as if “breathed through silver.”26 They worked in a fashion similar to allegory, in that myth had an applicability to our lives, but they were not something that one should believe actually happened. What was at the heart of myth—lies or truth?—was too important a point to each man for him to stay silent about. By 1931, Lewis was not the atheist he had been a decade before, but he was still reluctant to grant that myths had anything to do with historical fact. After an evening walk in the fall of 1931, in response to Lewis’s claim that myths were beautiful lies, Tolkien composed a lengthy poem of rhyming couplets titled “Mythopoeia,” with the clever inscription that it was from “Philomythus to Misomythus,” or, from a myth-lover to a myth-hater. In it, Tolkien argued his case that the myths people make still contain truth, because humans, though flawed are still creatures whose origins are in Truth, or the “only Wise”: The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned, his world-dominion by creative act.27

The creative act we engage in is myth making, as well as all other uses of language for naming and communication. Tolkien believed that because of origins, myths must contain an element of truth, and that the particular myths about a sacrificial god are rooted in an actual historical event. During 1930, Lewis had been reading the Gospels in Greek and noticed “they had not the mythical taste.”28 His academic training in the study of literature left him, he said, “too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths.”29 Lewis did come to see it Tolkien’s way: that is, Lewis agreed that myth could be true and historical, and that the story of Christ’s death and resurrection was more than myth—it was real. Lewis converted to Christianity in late September 1931, and ultimately, Lewis came to believe that of all the myths about a dying god, the Christian myth was itself the true account of the historical instance of the Sacrificial God. When writing about his new belief to a friend soon after his conversion, Lewis explained “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as

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the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”30 He would make this seemingly paradoxical statement—that it was a true myth— many times later in the course of his writings. He explained his point of view this way, in his essay “Myth Became Fact”: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences . . . [but] [b]y becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”31 What was initially a disagreement over myth spurred a significant investment of thought and time by Lewis and Tolkien, thus bringing the two closer together and strengthening their resolve to uphold the value of myth in literature and poetry. It would not be their last disagreement and it was clearly not a disagreement that ended their friendship. Quite the contrary: it led to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity and then to many years of a deepening friendship and an active, mutual, literary mentorship. In his autobiography, though he sounds a bit chagrinned, Lewis realizes the humor of the situation of Tolkien’s influence on him: “At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming in the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.”32 Not only was he both, but he was proudly both; one might say, even, that he was devoutly both. Tolkien had already been acting as a sub-creator for about a decade prior to Lewis’s conversion, fashioning his own world of Middle-earth according to his concept of how God made language-using beings: first there would be a language for beings to speak, then those beings would be active in their world, thus creating a history of events. By the early 1930s, Tolkien was at the point of writing some of the early myths of Middle-earth, though he took his role of sub-creation so seriously that his stories have the feel of fact much more than of myth, as he gave them incredibly rich detail and a consistency of names, dates, and places throughout its history. Lewis shared Tolkien’s eagerness to promote myth and fairy tales as a respected form of imaginative literature. They knew, now, that they had not just an advocate in each other but someone who could act as a reliable critic of their attempts at mythopoeia. Their partnership paid off, it would seem, based on their later success. Though there was nothing like a formulated plan, and though they did in fact differ in their approach to writing stories infused with the mythic quality, there was a sort of unstated mission to produce high quality literature that would please, first and foremost, themselves. And they shared the conviction that myth was at its most effective, and therefore most enchanting, when it was at its most true.

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STORIES WE LIKE TO READ Lewis and Tolkien continued to forge a friendship during the 1930s but it soon began to take on the marks of a real working mentorship as well. The influences and encouragement each received from the other became increasingly important for the development of their imaginative writing. Tolkien first shared his poem, “Lay of Leithien” to Lewis in 1929, which Lewis liked for its sense of reality and its quality of myth. He then gave Lewis an incomplete draft of The Hobbit in 1932, which he liked even more. Lewis encouraged Tolkien to publish The Hobbit, which was originally written for the enjoyment of Tolkien’s children. When it was published in 1937, Lewis wrote in a review: “all who love that kind of children’s book which can be read and re-read by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation. To the trained eye, some characters will seem almost mythopoeic.”33 Lewis concentrated on scholarly writings for much of the 1930s, but he began to develop an interest in speaking to groups about Christianity and writing book of apologetics. He had published his Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegorical telling of his conversion to Christianity, in 1933, yet he longed to stay immersed in the literature of myths and if he could do so with a group of friends, so much the better. So, with Tolkien, they convened a meeting of just such a group in the fall of 1933 in Lewis’s room at Magdalen College for the primary purpose of reading aloud mythic and fantasy literature and to share any work of their own that someone might have ready to read. They called themselves the Inklings and met weekly on Thursday nights for the next 16 years. This now famous literary group was comprised principally of Lewis, Tolkien, Lewis’s brother, Warren, and the Anglican novelist-poetdramatist-church historian Charles Williams. Other friends attended from time to time, such as Hugo Dyson and Owen Barfield. The members would take seats in front of the fire in Lewis’s sitting room, light their pipes, and then discuss whatever came to mind. Eventually they would settle in to hear whomever wanted to read aloud that evening. After the reading, there would be frank discussion about what the members saw as the merits or problems with the work. During these Inklings gatherings, Tolkien read aloud portions of The Silmarillion, his tales of the ancient history of Middle-earth (which he never finished for publication during his lifetime), and then, starting in the early 1940s, Tolkien read each newly completed section of The Lord of the Rings, which he was at the time calling his “new Hobbit.” Lewis read aloud his science fiction trilogy, the Screwtape Letters (which he dedicated to his good friend, Tolkien, upon its publication in 1944) and perhaps some of his works of apologetics.

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The Inklings gatherings were a highlight of the week for Lewis and Tolkien. In 1941, after Inklings meetings had been going on for some years, Lewis remarked: “Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a fire?”34 and it would seem that the meetings provided just the sort of audience for stimulating their imaginative literature. So enjoyable were the Thursday night meetings that they quickly spilled over into a second weekly meeting, usually on Tuesdays at mid-morning, at a local pub for beer and enthusiastic conversation, though there was no reading aloud of works-inprogress. From about 1930 to 1949, Lewis and Tolkien met twice almost every week, and while Lewis had the longer roster of friends to call upon, Tolkien’s understanding of the mythopoeic enterprise was unmatched by any of Lewis’s other friends. By about 1936, although Tolkien had completed The Hobbit and Lewis had published his allegorical spiritual autobiography, as well as a book of poetry, the two still felt that they should do something about the dearth in their time of new, high-quality mythopoeic literature. They were having a hard time finding new literature that would hold their attention, as Tolkien recalled in a letter to interviewers in 1968, and they thought they could do something about it: L[ewis] said to me one day: ‘Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.’ We agreed that he should try ‘space-travel’, and I should try ‘time-travel’. His result is well known. My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry. . . . We neither of us expected much success as amateurs, and actually Lewis had some difficulty in getting Out of the Silent Planet published. And after all that has happened since, the most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked—in large parts. Naturally neither of us liked all that we found in the other’s fiction.35

Thus, their mission, if one was ever formerly agreed upon, was to write the kind of stories that had in them what they “really liked.” (One might recall it was originally Tolkien’s assertion, in 1926, that literature was written to amuse men between the ages of thirty and forty. In 1936, Tolkien was 44 and Lewis was 38.) A simple flip of a coin determined that Lewis would try his hand at a space-travel story and Tolkien would try time-travel. Indicative of Lewis’s relative speed of composition, he published his part of the bargain just two years later. Out of the Silent Planet (1938) was read aloud to the Inklings and featured a thinly-disguised complimentary presentation of Tolkien as the hero of the tale Dr. Elwin (meaning Elf-friend) Ransom, a philologist at Cambridge University, who uses his skills as a linguist to understand the alien beings living on Mars (called Malacandra) after he is taken by force to

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the planet to be a human sacrifice. Out of the Silent Planet must have been well-received by the Inklings, for Lewis went on to write Perelandra (1943) and then That Hideous Strength (1945) to make a science fiction trilogy out of his deal with Tolkien. Tolkien’s typical method of composition led to a not surprising end: his initial attempt to write a tale of time-travel became overly complicated and burdened with detail and was eventually left as an unfinished work. He called it The Lost Road and it was a tale of a present day English father and son who, through the son’s visions a dreams, are able to travel back to a time to meet another father and son, similar to them, who are living at the time in Middle-earth’s history when the star-shaped island of N´umenor, is destroyed. This tale, based on the myth of Atlantis, provided inspiration for Tolkien’s story of The Downfall of N´umenor included in The Silmarillion, but as for it being his contribution to the kind of literature that pleased Lewis and Tolkien, it never went beyond the circle of the Inklings. (To be fair, Tolkien did start The Lord of the Rings soon after his agreement with Lewis, and though it was not published until some 16 years later, it surely made up for not finishing The Lost Road.) Lewis heard this tale, however, and was influenced by it as well as by The Silmarillion. Tolkien was aware of his stories being an influence on Lewis’s science fiction,36 which Lewis would have been working on shortly after the time at which Tolkien gave up on The Lost Road. Many of the names in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength are spelled similar to how they would have sounded to Lewis when Tolkien was reading The Lost Road and parts of The Silmarillion aloud to Lewis at Inklings meetings and in Tolkien’s home. Tolkien’s N´umenor and the elves Tuor, Idril and Tin´uviel, and Lewis’s Numinor, Tor and Tindril. There are similar ideas present in the works of both men as well, which most likely date to the to this time of fruitful sharing of manuscripts in the early 1940s. Tolkien, while working on volumes for the Oxford English Dictionary after World War I, was responsible for entries in the “W” volume, and had learned the origins of the word wreath were from wraith and wrath, meaning bent or twisted. Tolkien employed the connotation of being bent, or not straight, when naming the Ringwraiths, those former human kings corrupted and bent by the evil Sauron into living-dead seekers of the powerful rings in The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s The Lost Road, he plays upon the idea that the road that is lost is a straight road through time, which is now crooked and cannot be traveled in a straight way, which would connect all peoples and events in history could it be traveled. His concept of a straight road became the idea of the path to the true West, or immortality, in Middle-earth, as he revealed in a letter written well after the publication of The Lord of the Rings: “The ‘immortals’ who were permitted to leave Middle-earth

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and seek Aman—the undying lands of Valinor and Eress¨ea, an island assigned to the Eldar—set sail in ships specially made . . . [which] followed the straight road to the true West and not the bent road of the earth’s surface.”37 In Lewis’s space-trilogy, angelic beings called Oyarsa control the planets, and the evil Oyarsa who has been banished to Earth is called the Bent One. Furthermore, in The Lost Road, time did not elapse in the current world when the father and son traveled back to N´umenor, just as time does not continue on when the Pevensie children are away in Narnia. Lewis and Tolkien certainly never sought to become popular writers, in the sense of having fame and a comfortable income from their books. They did, however, agree to treat the topic of myth seriously and draw upon the content of Fa¨erie without apology to their academic peers. At the time, the Oxford academic culture frowned upon its professors dabbling in writing literature; books of scholarship, or at least writings in their content areas, were the things they should be producing. Tolkien had an easier time than Lewis of escaping the judgment of his peers, as he had been made Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925, and had secured his professional standing among his colleagues. Additionally, the study of myths, fables, and tales was part of the proper course of study within philology, so, as a philologist, it was within reason to be writing tales that were linguistic in their origins. Tolkien had been working on his invented language of “Quenya,” a language influenced by Finnish that became “High-elven” in The Lord of the Rings, since his convalescence after World War I. The Lord of the Rings, and to a lesser extent The Hobbit, were the results of a philologist creating a language first and then imagining the peoples who spoke it, the world they inhabited, and the conflicts that would have taken place in that created world. Tom Shippey offers a brilliant and thoroughly supported argument in his The Road to Middle Earth for why Tolkien’s stories should be read as products of philological creativity. Lewis had no professional reason, as far as his Oxford colleagues were concerned, to engage in writing science fiction, nor the kind of satire that was The Screwtape Letters, nor Christian apologetics nor children’s literature. Tolkien was an exception among the critics, of course, but he was only mildly sympathetic to Lewis’s plight, and really was at a loss to see how any of his friend’s writings could be considered to be in his content area of Medieval and Renaissance literature. As all of Lewis biographers point out, he was never promoted to a chair at Oxford, despite his accomplished work of literary criticism of medieval literature, The Allegory of Love, published in 1936. After Lewis’s death, Tolkien explained to Walter Hooper, their mutual friend: “No Oxford don was forgiven for writing books outside his field of study . . . But it was considered unforgivable that Lewis wrote international best-sellers and

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worse still that many were of a religious nature.”38 Eventually, though, Lewis was offered a professorate and chair position in 1954 at Oxford’s rival, Cambridge University, which Lewis accepted. Despite Tolkien’s displeasure with Lewis’s writing outside his field, Tolkien was not blind to Lewis’s extraordinary talents as a scholar and lecturer. Tolkien had recommended him for a chair at Oxford in the mid-1940s, to no avail, and so when a new position was created at Cambridge, Tolkien (who was on the nominating committee for the Cambridge chair) recommended Lewis for the position and personally encouraged Lewis to take it. The Inklings eventually dwindled down to just a few attending members after the death of Charles Williams in 1945. Hugo Dyson complained of being tired of hearing about elves and voted against Tolkien reading aloud any more from The Lord of the Rings.39 Tolkien started attending less frequently after that and in October 1949, no one was coming to Lewis’s room after suppertime. This period of the Inklings meetings had been, for Lewis and Tolkien, a rich time of influence and encouragement in each man’s life, as they worked together to refine their specific literary attitudes and habits and as they set out to write stories that pleased them. In addition to Lewis publishing many well-received works of literature and apologetics, and Tolkien publishing The Hobbit, his essay On Fairy Stories, and his creation of The Lord of the Rings, it was during this time the two firmed-up their conviction that mythopoeic literature was not only appropriate for adults to be writing and reading, but was perhaps the best way to restore in adults values and virtues both Lewis and Tolkien ascribed to the “Old Western Man” and feared were being quickly eradicated in the modern age of the machine. After meeting with a frequency and regularity for so many years, and after having most of their conversation wind their way back to the same topics of literature, languages and myth, it is not surprising that a bond grew between them strong enough to withstand some noticeable strain for roughly another 15 years, until Lewis’s death in 1963. A FRIENDSHIP TESTED What brought Lewis and Tolkien together—myth, languages, and later, Christian belief—were, ironically, the very things that began to push them apart later in life. More accurately stated, it was Tolkien who began to withdraw from Lewis, due mostly to matters pertaining to how Lewis handled the mythopoeic process and how he practiced the “true myth” of Christianity. Tolkien felt that he was getting less and less of Lewis’s attention, too, when Charles Williams joined the Inklings meetings. It never appeared that Lewis was withdrawing from Tolkien in quite the same way as Tolkien withdrew

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from Lewis, but then, Lewis was not likely to withdraw from anyone, instead preferring to receive what each person had to offer and wanting to make the best of all relationships to whatever extent possible. We may take Lewis’s prerequisite for beginning a friendship with anyone to be simply a shared experience of interest, as he said in The Four Loves: “Friendship arises . . . when two or more companions discover that they have in common some insight of interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”40 Tolkien was, by nature, of a different temperament, and developed close friendships slowly and less frequently. Though by all accounts a polite and compassionate man, he was much less gregarious than Lewis. From about the mid-1940s, Tolkien became increasingly doubtful of the wisdom of Lewis’s decisions in his private life and writing life. He regarded Charles Williams as merely an amicable acquaintance with whom he had little in common, but Williams’s theology—a potent mix of romanticism, spiritualism, and Anglican Christianity—fascinated Lewis, who was also a fan of Williams’s fiction. Tolkien objected to the supernaturalism in Williams stories and said he detected a presence of black magic or devilry in his stories.41 He also thought that Lewis’s last work in his space-trilogy, That Hideous Strength, had been spoiled by Williams’s influence. It is telling that in Tolkien’s practice of his Catholicism, he was, as George Sayer, a mutual friend of Lewis and Tolkien’s explained, “what spiritual directors call ‘scrupulous,’ that is, inclined to exaggerate the evil of the undisciplined and erring thoughts”42 and prone to make even the smallest problems matters for confession and correction. Tolkien strived to live such a principled life and had enjoyed so much of Lewis’s attention for a good decade before Lewis met Williams, that it likely caused him great distress to see Lewis turn a bit of his attention away from Tolkien toward a man of questionable orthodoxy. Sayer further recalled: [t]heir relationship before [World War II] had been very close, so close that Edith Tolkien had resented the time that her husband spent with him. Lewis, who was aware of this, for his part found it impossible to see as much as he would have liked of Tolkien . . . Tolkien wanted to be first among Lewis’s friends. Lewis may have loved Tolkien as much but he wanted him to be one among several friends.43

As is often quoted from The Four Loves, and in this passage it is obvious whom Charles and Ronald are, Lewis wrote: In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out . . . Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a

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specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself ” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.44

One could say that perhaps Tolkien was more jealous than friendly toward Lewis, but there is sufficient evidence in Tolkien’s letters to support the view that more than jealousy, it was probably Tolkien’s thinking that Charles Williams was not “qualified to become a real friend.” Still, when Walter Hooper, a friend of both authors, visited Tolkien soon after Lewis’s death, he said that although Tolkien still thought that Lewis “had not made enough time for me” it was his impression that Tolkien missed Lewis greatly and was finding it difficult to believe his friend had died.45 Tolkien explained in a letter 6 months after Lewis’s death that Lewis “was my closest friend from about 1927 to 1940, and remained very dear to me. His death was a grievous blow. But in fact we saw less and less of one another after he came under the dominant influence of Charles Williams, and still less after his strange marriage.”46 That strange marriage of Lewis’s, which Tolkien—the devout Roman Catholic—thoroughly disapproved of, was to the American divorc´ee Joy Davidman Gresham, whom Lewis first met in 1952, married once in a civil ceremony in 1956 so she could remain in England, and then married a second time, out of love, in a Christian ceremony in 1957. For most of the 1950s, Lewis’s time was spent with Joy (who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1956 and then died in 1960) and on tending to his brother Warren, a confirmed alcoholic. Lewis was by now receiving an incredible amount of fan mail, from readers of The Chronicles of Narnia and his apologetics, and he took the time to respond to each letter, all on top of beginning his new position at Cambridge University in 1954. Though Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship continued through the 1950s, it did so in the absence of any regular visits with one another and with only occasional correspondence. The two had their creative differences too, which expressed themselves over time to the point where Tolkien was deeply bothered by how Lewis created his world of Narnia. Tolkien had no appreciation for Lewis’s immensely popular children’s stories, which he considered to be too much of a distinct Christian allegory and too much of a random world of unexplainable creatures, with no ancestries, cultural habitudes, or, worst of all, no distinct languages. Beavers and fauns and Father Christmas, for example, do not (or rather, would not) speak and behave in the same way in our world, so why should they do so in the sub-created world of Narnia? Tolkien, of course, felt the need to invent languages for his characters and provide them with histories that were unique

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to their particular race or species. But then, he was by far the more worrisome writer when it came to practicing his craft. He was meticulous with his detail and habitually doubted the quality of his work, and likely would never have completed The Lord of the Rings had not Lewis kept encouraging him in the 1940s that it was a very good story. Two years after Lewis’s death, Tolkien remarked to a friend, “the unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I get the idea that my ‘stuff ’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought [The Lord of the Rings] to a conclusion.”47 Lewis embraced the role of being a sub-creator, but he didn’t have such a religious conviction about how to be a mythopoeic author. The burden he felt to create a story with God-like attention to detail and consistency was much lighter than Tolkien’s. And Lewis never intended for his stories to have the convincing aura of fact, calling many of them “supposals,” as in: “let’s suppose another land existed where the Christian story was also happening, only with Christ as a lion who came to redeem animals and mythic creatures as well as humans.” As for Lewis’s apologetic writings, Tolkien held to the traditional Catholic position that the teaching of Christian theology or explaining matters of faith should be left to trained theologians. Tolkien occasionally expressed his concerns about the soundness of some of Lewis’s views, and called Lewis an “Everyman’s Theologian,” not intended as a compliment. That Lewis was a Protestant—a Northern Irish Protestant—and Tolkien was a loyal English Roman Catholic has never been a secret from anyone who knew them or had read biographies of them since the 1970s. By reading their fiction alone, it seems unlikely one could detect significant theological differences between the two. But much has been made of these facts in recent years, mostly by Tolkien scholars and mostly, it would seem, to distinguish Tolkien from Lewis even more than is obvious and to secure his greatness as a Catholic writer. Dwelling on their differences in Christian belief and practice does not necessarily promote a more enjoyable experience of reading their equally amazing literary creations. Recognizing how each man’s faith influenced him certainly does, however, illuminate why and how Tolkien wrote the way he did and why Lewis did it differently. For example, Lewis was willing to touch on the allegorical in much of his fiction so that the Biblical stories of creation, temptation, a fall from grace, and a savior’s act of redemption are recognizable in the created worlds in his stories. Ralph Wood, in The Gospel According to Tolkien, notes that “unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien is no sort of evangelist. Tolkien the Catholic is confident that the sacramental and missional life of the church will convey the Gospel

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to the world without the assistance of his own art.”48 Tolkien preferred fantasy over allegory, thinking it allowed for a greater variety of application for readers’ experiences. Regarding Lewis’s works of apologetics, Wood speculates Tolkien didn’t disapprove of them not simply because Lewis was not a trained theologian but because Tolkien disagreed with the theological content of the books.49 Joseph Pearce, in C. S. Lewis and The Catholic Church, his update to Christopher Derrick’s 1981 book, C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome, offers a thoughtful look at the weaker moments in the two men’s lives, when they would occasionally fall back into suspicions engrained in them since childhood. Pearce concludes, still, that it was Tolkien who harbored more resentment toward Lewis the Ulster Protestant than Lewis ever did toward his Catholic friend. “Lewis clearly believed that he found his True home in Anglicanism,” Pearce writes, but Lewis had also become the most catholic of Anglicans possible while still maintaining an anti-Romanist position.50 Nevertheless, Pearce recognizes that each man’s influence on the other transcended their theological differences: “If Lewis had discovered in Tolkien a much-valued mentor, Tolkien had found in Lewis an appreciative and sympathetic audience.”51 Colin Duriez, the estimable and prolific scholar of the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien offers, in Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, a most sensible and appropriately balanced interpretation of how the two, while being of such similar mind and talents and while having produced such wonderfully rich literature in the twentieth century, could have come to such differences later in life: Tolkien was a sensitive man of particularities, both creative and religious, whom, especially in his later years, became increasingly inflexible in his devotion to the Realm of Fa¨erie and the Church of Rome. Lewis, a confident man, was energized to accomplish much, and though his mind and wit were razor sharp he rarely hesitated to second-guess his writings, his relationships, and his Christian behavior. The two Oxford dons, enchanted as youth by myths and the languages used to express them, mentored each other toward realizing their goal: the creation of stories that pleased them and that would elevate fantasy literature to its proper position among the classics enjoyed by both children and adults. There were real disagreements and those disagreements placed some real strain on their friendship, but never was there any real animosity nor any breach of loyalty. Tolkien wrote to his daughter, Priscilla, after attending Lewis’s funeral, and described the loss he felt this way: “I have felt the normal feelings of a man my age—like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots. Very sad that we should have been so separated in

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the last years; but our time of close communion endured in memory for both of us.”52 NOTES 1. The results of these polls are discussed in Joseph Pearce, Tolkien: Man and Myth (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1998), 1–4. 2. “The Best of Millennium Poll,” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/ features/c/century/best–of millennium.html/102-9275193-1812964 (accessed August 12, 2006). 3. C. S. Lewis, All My Road before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927, ed. Walter Hooper. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1991), 393. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 5 6. George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988), 12. 7. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 10. 8. Ibid., 18. 9. Ibid., 16. 10. Ibid., 16–17. 11. Ibid., 17. 12. Ibid., 73. 13. Sayer, Jack, 21. 14. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 15. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid. 17. J. R. R. Tolkien, Foreword to the Second Edition, The Lord of the Rings (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), xv. 18. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. With assistance of Christopher Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 377. 19. Ibid. 20. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 39. 21. Ibid., 33–34. 22. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” Tree and Leaf (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 40–41. 23. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 29. 24. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 42. 25. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 82. 26. Lewis’s comments are noted in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” and in Christopher Tolkien’s Introduction to Tree and Leaf, 6.

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27. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia,” Tree and Leaf, 98. 28. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 236. 29. Ibid. 30. C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis. Rev. ed., Walter Hooper. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1993), 288. 31. C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 66–67. 32. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 216. 33. Qtd. in Carpenter, Inklings, 65. 34. C. S. Lewis, Letters, 363. 35. Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 378. 36. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 177. 37. Carpenter, The Letters of J.R. R. Tolkien, 410–411. 38. Qtd. in Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2003), 151. 39. Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, 129. 40. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1960), 65. 41. Carpenter, Inklings, 121. 42. George Sayer, “Recollections of J. R. R. Tolkien,” in ed., Joseph Pearce. Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius 2001), 10. 43. Ibid., 14. 44. Four Loves, 61. 45. Walter Hooper, “Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: An Interview with Walter Hooper,” in Joseph Pearce. Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius 2001), 191. 46. Ibid., 349. 47. Carpenter, Letters, 362. 48. Ralph Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle–earth. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 6. 49. Ibid., “Following,” 604. 50. Joseph Pearce, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2003), 169. 51. Ibid., 35. 52. Ibid., 341

BIBLIOGRAPHY Amazon.com. “The Best of Millennium Poll.” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ subst/features/c/century/best–of–millennium.html/102-9275193-1812964 (accessed August 12, 2006).

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Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. London: HarperCollins, 1997. ———. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 2000. ———, ed. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. With assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2003. Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle–earth. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Hooper, Walter. “Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: An Interview with Walter Hooper.” In Pearce, Tolkien: A Celebration, San Francisco, CA: Ignatius 2001, 190– 198. Lewis, C. S. All My Road before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991. ———. The Four Loves. Reprint. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1960. ———. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Edited by W. H. Lewis. Rev ed. Walter Hooper. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1993. ———. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock. ed., Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970. 63–67. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1955. ———. ed., Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966. Pearce, Joseph. C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2003. ———. ed., Tolkien: A Celebration. Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius 2001. ———. Tolkien: Man and Myth. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1998. Sayer, George. Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988. ———. “Recollections of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Pearce, Tolkien: A Celebration, San Francisco, CA: Ignatius 2001, 1–16. Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. The Road to Middle—earth, Rev and expanded ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Tolkien, J. R. R. “Foreword to the Second Edition.” The Lord of the Rings. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994, xv. ———. “Mythopoeia.” Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989, 97–101. ———. “On Fairy Stories.” Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989, 9–73.

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———. Tree and Leaf. With an Introduction by Christopher Tolkien. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Wood, Ralph C. “Following the Many Roads of Recent Tolkien Scholarship.” Christianity and Literature. 54(4) (2005): 587–608. ———. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003.

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C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman: Severe Mercies, Late Romance Lyle W. Dorsett and Jake Hanson

After C. S. Lewis went public with his conversion and commitment to Jesus Christ, controversy hounded him until his death. Fashionable agnostics dubbed him “Heavy Lewis,” liberal Christians reviled him for his lack of theological sophistication, and fundamentalists attacked his interpretation of scripture and his ecumenical charity toward most Christian traditions. But neither these issues nor a host of other contentions stirred up anything like the furor that surrounded his marriage to Helen Joy Davidman. In the mind of many of C. S. Lewis’s friends it was bad enough that a bachelor nearly 60 years old married a woman of forty. But to make matters worse, she was an American divorcee who also happened to be Jewish and the mother of two boys. The brilliant and attractive woman Mr. Lewis married in 1956 possessed a well-deserved literary reputation in her own right years before she met the celebrated Oxford don. Born in New York City to well-educated Jewish parents in 1915, Joy Davidman attended public schools and then went on to earn a B.A. at Hunter College and a M.A. from Columbia University. From childhood Joy exhibited marked intellectual prowess. She broke the scale on an IQ test in elementary school and as a youngster she loved books and typically read numerous volumes each week. Obviously a prodigy, Joy manifested unusual critical and analytical skills, as well as musical talent. Raised in a

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middle class Bronx neighborhood, Joy Davidman even amazed her brilliant and demanding father by being able to read a score of Chopin and then play it on the piano without another glance at the score. Similarly she would take her part in a Shakespeare play and memorize her lines after the first reading. Howard Davidman, Joy’s brother and her junior by four years, recalled that her striking intellectual powers and aggressive personality elicited his devoted admiration but at the same time inhibited him. To be sure, Howard was no intellectual slouch. Indeed, he excelled at the University of Virginia and became a medical doctor who practiced psychiatry in Manhattan after serving in World War II. Nevertheless, he confessed that he was so intimidated by Joy’s writing that he never attempted to publish anything until his sister died. Joy Davidman’s parents were both Jewish, but her father, Joseph, had forsaken the God associated with his religious upbringing, opting instead for a godless materialism that stated that everything can be explained through matter and nature. Her mother remained somewhat religious, but could not hold sway over the influence of Joy’s father on the intellectual climate of the household. Her father always insisted that a person with intellectual respectability was a materialist. The spiritual world was not even elevated, in his eyes, to the level of active imagination. On the contrary, people who pursued truth in the realm of the unseen were, like medieval people, ignorant and superstitious. This pressure, along with Joy’s intense desire for her father’s approval, makes it easy to see the direction of her early belief system. As a child, Joy made Herculean efforts to win her father’s praise and adoration. She read books that he liked, including H. G. Wells’s Outline of History at the age of eight, after which she proudly declared that she, like her father, was an atheist. This conviction would last into her adulthood. But even so she was attracted to fantasy literature, often by Christian authors such as George MacDonald as well as the mystical poetry and novels of Lord Dunsany, who had her longing for something more. Joy would later recall that through this reading, she “became deeply interested in Christ and didn’t know it.”1 Joy Davidman’s childhood and life in general was filled with considerable physical ailments. She lived in pain for much of her childhood with a crooked spine that was not properly diagnosed for several years.2 In addition to this troubling condition, Joy suffered from a severe case of Grave’s disease that was also misdiagnosed for a long time. This condition, also known as hyperthyroidism or exophthalmic goiter, is an overactive thyroid problem that causes, among other things, protruding eyes. The recommended procedure for this problem at the time was the removal of part of the thyroid gland. But Joy feared surgery, so the Davidmans found a doctor who was experimenting with an alternative treatment where a radium belt would be placed around

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the patient’s neck for 24 hours once a week for an entire year. He theorized that the radioactivity would be absorbed by the thyroid gland, suppressing its hyperactivity. The treatment helped Joy’s condition. But in retrospect, the cure may have been more harmful than the disease. Many physicians see a direct cause-andeffect relationship between exposure to radium and cancer. This may certainly have been the case for Joy, whose body was riddled with cancer soon after she turned forty. As if Grave’s disease and curvature of the spine were not enough, the chronically sick child also suffered with hyperinsulinism. Hyperinsulinism is a condition where the body produces too much insulin resulting in a low level of sugar in the blood. As a result of this condition Joy was subject to fainting spells and had an insatiable appetite. As her weight increased, Joy’s mother became concerned about her eating habits and so installed a lock on the family refrigerator. Only after many scoldings, embarrassments, and confusion was her condition diagnosed.3 To make matters worse, Joy also suffered a severe case of scarlet fever in high school, and soon after was laid low by anemia. These illnesses made her miss months of school, which she took advantage of by reading as much as her illnesses would allow. Despite her physical problems and absences from school, Joy Davidman graduated from a demanding high school at age fourteen. She read books at home for the next year and matriculated at Hunter College at age fifteen. In college the prodigy exuded a passion for writing. It was there that she got her first real opportunity to work with a publication as an associate editor of Echo, an in-house literary magazine for Hunter College. As associate editor, Joy not only wrote short stories and poems, she also translated poems from languages she was proficient in such as German and Latin. She also took French in college and as if these activities were not enough, she taught herself Greek during spare time. During her time at Hunter College, Joy wrote at least two significant stories, each published in Echo. The first was published in November 1934 and was called “Apostate.” This story is about a young Jewish woman named Chinya, living in a Russian village. Significantly, Chinya’s father is mean and stingy. In the story, he is about to betroth his daughter to a small, weak man whom she dislikes because the fianc´e would accept her with a small dowry. On the eve of the wedding, Chinya elopes with a strong and enticing Christian who will marry her if she will be baptized. Just before the baptism is performed, Chinya’s father and brothers come in and beat this “apostate” family member as the groom-to-be watches without lifting a hand, and the Christian bystanders laugh as the bride is beaten by her own kin. This story is a powerful one, and it won the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize at Hunter that year. But it is tempting to read it as more than just a story,

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as Joy may have herself been wrestling with issues of apostasy. This wrestling can be further examined in light of her relationships during this time. Joy had few friends while in college, and she seldom dated. But she embarked on an affair with one of her professors who was old enough to be her father. At first she was extremely proud of her accomplishment, but it soon became clear that this was a dead-end relationship. Her short story “Reveal the Titan” seems to be directly related to this affair and may have been her therapeutic outlet from the short-lived romance. The story involves a man who cuts off an affair with a woman to pursue his obsession with music. Six years later he returns to his former lover and learns that she has had his child. Despite affection for her and a desire to assume his responsibility as a father, he cannot bring himself to give up his total devotion to composition. Whether or not these stories were tied to her real-life experiences and need for cathartic release, they do have intriguing parallels. An event transpired just a few weeks before graduation from Hunter that would deeply impact Joy. While sitting in class, she looked out her classroom window just in time to see a poor young woman jump off the roof of an adjoining building and plunge to her death. Joy later learned that this young woman was a Depression-era orphan who had been hungry for days. As Joy pondered the wasteful nation of which she was a part and how it did nothing to help this poor wretch, her anger grew and she began to question seriously the capitalistic system on which the United States was based. This event would begin to shape her belief system, which would lead to her involvement in the Communist Party later in life. Joy graduated from Hunter College in the Spring of 1934 at the age of nineteen, and became a high school teacher the following year while working on her master’s degree from Columbia University, which she received in just three semesters. Her teaching experience proved disappointing. Because of tight budgets during the Great Depression, new teachers were given the title of “permanent substitutes” and paid significantly less than tenured faculty with no hope of future advancement toward tenure. In addition, the “permanent substitutes” were given additional chores such as scrubbing floors, typing, and mimeographing. Joy resented the classification and in the end she was not fulfilled in teaching; she was a writer. A big break came for Joy’s writing career in January 1936 when Poetry, a prestigious magazine out of Chicago, edited by the venerable Harriet Monroe, bought several of her poems. Monroe published a few more of Joy’s works and then asked her to serve as a reader and editor for the magazine.4 This new success, as well as disappointment with being a teacher, led Joy to resign her teaching position after one year, and devote fulltime to writing and editing.

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Her choice to write turned out to be a wise one. By age twenty-three her poetry caught the attention of Stephen Vincent Ben´et. Ben´et was the editor of Yale University Press’s Younger Poet Series, a series of books of poetry by up-and-coming poets. Because of limited funds, Ben´et was only able to publish one volume by a single poet a year. He was highly selective as he received hundreds of entries each year. Impressed with Davidman’s work, he chose to publish forty-five of her poems in 1938 in a volume entitled Letter to a Comrade. This volume was celebrated by Ben´et, received excellent reviews, and it sold quite well for a poetry volume. Ben´et wrote that he hoped “Miss Davidman’s book will reach a rather larger audience than that generally reserved for first books of verse.”5 It did. The first printing immediately sold out, and it was reprinted in 1971, a happy fate experienced by few modern poets. Letter to a Comrade gives us insight into Joy Davidman’s thoughts during this time and her growing activism. Her radical tendencies toward socialism and communism neither permeated nor overwhelmed the book, but they are present in the title of the volume and in such poems as, “Apology for Liberals” and “End of a Revolutionary.” She celebrated an incipient feminism in “This Woman,” and the still unhealed wounds from her undergraduate affair can be seen in “An Absolution,” and “Jewess to Aryan.” Perhaps most intriguing about Letter to a Comrade is Joy’s continuing fascination with Christianity, especially Jesus, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection as seen in poems such as “And Pilate Said,” and “Againrising.” These poems show an increasingly thoughtful young woman sorting through her complex world. Joy’s initial literary successes led to friendships in the eastern literary establishment. Indeed she became acquainted with Carl Brandt and through him, Brandt and Brandt, one of New York’s finest literary agencies, took her on as a client. Through her friend Carl Brandt she also won invitations to the prestigious community of writers at the McDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she spent four summers. There she wrote articles, poetry, and edited another volume of verse. In 1940, Anya, her first novel was published by Macmillan and was well received. Based on real events that Joy’s mother recalled from her childhood in a Ukrainian village, Anya is a fast-moving story about a young woman’s life and love from adolescence to middle age. Though the actual names of real people were changed in the story, so vivid was the story that Joy’s mother was still fearful that the characters would be recognized. Always the radical with somewhat of an obsessive personality, Joy Davidman, like many intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s, proclaimed herself disillusioned with capitalism and the “American system.” One day at the MacDowell Colony, Joy went for a long walk and contemplated the wretchedness

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in the world. Sorting through various panaceas in her mind, it occurred to her, “If I keep on thinking like this I’ll be a Communist.” She stopped abruptly on the pathway, took an honest look at herself, and somewhat surprisedly exclaimed, “By God, I am a Communist.”6 Joy flirted with Communism during these tumultuous years. And while she never came close to becoming a doctrinaire Marxist, she did advocate socialism over capitalism, especially since the later system, to her mind, had failed and caused the Great Depression. Joy joined the Communist Party, and threw herself full-force into the cause of the party. This, as she saw it, became her opportunity to try to change the world. The Communist Party found her journalistic skills very useful and almost immediately employed her skills at the Party’s semi-official magazine New Masses. She became the magazine’s film critic, book reviewer, and poetry editor, and reveled in the power she had now attained in rejecting and accepting poetry, and criticizing both films and books. She also found delight in using poetry for a meaningful purpose, even a sharply political one. In the end, Joy Davidman found the Communist meetings and most of the members quite boring. There were few people who were able to meet her zealous expectations and ceaseless drive. In addition, Joy’s idealistic views of the Soviet Union and its model of Communism were all but demolished by the nation’s dreadful and oppressive policies during and after the Second World War.7 This disillusionment made it increasingly difficult for Joy to maintain zeal for the Party. Her work on New Masses eventually became a job rather than a passion, and so the purposes that first attracted Joy to the Party began to crumble. Indeed, the only things Joy got out of her brief affair with Communism was part-time employment as a journalist for the Communist magazine, plus an acquaintance with another left-wing writer who would later become her husband and the father of their two bright and healthy boys. As early as 1942, 27-year-old Joy Davidman concluded that the Communist Party in America had only one valid reason for being, “it is a great matchmaker.”8 In August that year, Joy married William Lindsay Gresham, novelist, journalist, Spanish Civil War veteran, charming story teller, and sometime guitar player and vocalist in Greenwich Village drinking establishments. They had met in Communist Party circles, and began dating. When in 1942–1943, Joy became the editor of a book of anti-imperialist war poetry, titled, War Poems of the United Nations, she asked Bill to contribute, along with 150 other poets and writers. Even though Bill still had strong leftist sentiments, he had grown disillusioned with Communists and their lofty and hollow speeches during his time in Spain. His dim view of the leftist movement hurried Joy out of the Party especially when she gave birth to their two sons: David in early 1944, and Douglas less than a year and a half later.

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By her own admission, Joy Davidman Gresham had been searching for fulfillment for years. College and graduate school, writing and editing, and socializing with some of New York’s most celebrated editors and authors, as well as political activism, were all good in their place, nevertheless, she still longed for meaning and peace. With highest expectations she entered into family life with her husband. While Bill Gresham wrote and sold novels, including one, Nightmare Alley, that became a motion picture starring Tyrone Power, Joy stayed at home, did some freelance writing, and cared for her little boys, and the house and garden. The Gresham marriage was in trouble from the outset. If Joy had searched systematically for the wrong mate, she could not have improved on Bill Gresham. Bill was in many ways a broken man. After his first marriage had fallen apart and his writing career went into decline, Bill joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight alongside the freedom fighters of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. When the freedom fighters were defeated, Bill returned to America and found himself on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The pain had gone on long enough, so Bill hanged himself with a leather belt from a hook in his closet. To his utter astonishment, the hook broke out of the wall, and he found himself unable even to commit suicide. Consequently he sought help from a Freudian psychoanalyst who helped him see how he was scarred by events in his childhood, and his parents’ divorce in particular. Nevertheless, Bill did not receive the healing for which he would continue to search for in marriage to Joy. Although Bill Gresham was extraordinarily charming and intelligent, he was a wounded soul with a serious drinking problem. Binges and hangovers cut into his writing—just when his growing family required more time and money. Bill not only wasted time and earned little money, he embarked upon a series of extra-marital affairs that at once broke Joy’s heart and drove her to fits of anger and despair. To make matters worse, she had few friends and absolutely no religion to turn to for strength. C. S. Lewis once remarked that “every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.” By the end of 1945 large cracks began to appear in Joy’s protective armor. Better educated and more intelligent than most people, well published and highly respected for a person only 30 years old, Joy had seldom if ever seriously entertained weakness or failure. But Bill’s long absences from home, his apparent lack of concern for her and his abusive behavior toward the boys left her devastated. One night in spring 1946, Bill called from Manhattan and announced he was having a nervous breakdown.9 Whether true or just another cover story for one of his escapades is beside the point. In brief, he was not coming home and refused to comment on when or if ever he would be back. Bill then rang off and Joy walked into the nursery where her babies

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slept. In her words, she was all alone with her fears and the quiet. She recalled later that “for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, ‘the master of my fate’ . . . All my defenses—all the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God—went down momentarily—and God came in.”10 She went on to describe her perception of the ensuing mystical encounter this way: It is infinite, unique; there are no words, there are no comparisons . . . Those who have known God will understand me . . . There was a Person with me in that room, directly present to my consciousness—a Person so real that all my precious life was by comparison a mere shadow play. And I myself was more alive than I had ever been; it was like waking from sleep. So intense a life cannot be endured long by flesh and blood; we must ordinarily take our life watered down, diluted as it were, by time and space and matter. My perception of God lasted perhaps half a minute.11

Bill returned home several days later to find Joy a changed woman. She was of course concerned about him, but he found in her a serenity that had not existed before. Bill was ready for change in his own life. When Joy described her mystical experience, Bill accepted it without question, and was even eager to find the same peace.12 Joy concluded that inasmuch as God apparently exists, then there is nothing more important than learning who He is and what He requires of us. Consequently the former atheist embarked upon a journey to know more of God. At the outset she explored Reformed Judaism but could find no inner peace. Always the reader, she devoured books and verse on spirituality, including Francis Thompson’s long poem “The Hound of Heaven.” It was first Thompson’s poetry and then three books by C. S. Lewis—The Great Divorce, Miracles, and The Screwtape Letters—that caused her to read the Bible. And when she got into the Gospels, according to her testimony, she recognized the One who had come to her; “He was Jesus.”13 Joy Davidman found nourishing spiritual food in the Bible and the writings of C. S. Lewis. And through her interest in Lewis, the publications of a liberal arts college professor and poet, Chad Walsh, who also happened to be a mid-life convert, caught her attention. Walsh wrote a biographical article on C. S. Lewis for the New York Times in 1948, and he published the first biography of Mr. Lewis a few months later entitled C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics. Joy corresponded with Chad Walsh about her many questions related to Lewis’s books and her new-found faith. Walsh understood and respected Joy’s pilgrimage, so he and his wife, Eva, frequently entertained Joy, Bill, and their boys at their summer cottage on Lake Iroquois in Vermont. The C. S. Lewis–Walsh connection provided just the right tonic for Joy’s thirsty soul. At Chad Walsh’s suggestion she read everything Lewis wrote as

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well as some books by Charles Williams, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers. By 1948, Joy pursued instruction in a Presbyterian Church near her upstate New York home. Soon thereafter she and the boys were baptized. Between the New York pastor and her mentor, Chad Walsh, Joy grew in faith and began manifesting signs of genuine conversion and repentance. At Walsh’s urging, Joy wrote to C. S. Lewis about some of her thoughts on his books. Although Walsh assured Joy that Lewis always welcomed letters and answered his correspondence, it took her two years to find the courage to write. When she did, in January 1950, Lewis’s brother, Warren, noted in his journal that Jack had received a fascinating letter from a most interesting American woman, Mrs. Gresham. For the next two and a half years Joy Gresham and C. S. Lewis carried on a rich correspondence that intellectually and spiritually encouraged each of them. Joy found herself for the first time in her life delighted to have her arguments logically torn to pieces by her new pen friend. Over that quarter decade Joy’s health and family problems opened the way for the famous English author and his talented American acquaintance to meet. During the late 1940s, Joy’s health deteriorated. She suffered from nervous exhaustion while trying to raise the boys and write enough to pay all the bills inasmuch as her husband’s contribution to the family was becoming more limited. To be sure, Bill Gresham sobered up for brief periods, but he was in and out of the house depending on his moods. In 1948, William Lindsay Gresham claimed the faith of his wife, and attended church with her and their two children. He and Joy even wrote their testimonies which were written in 1949, but published 2 years later in 1951 in a volume of testimonies entitled These Found the Way. An analysis of these testimonies shows that Bill’s testimony closely paralleled Joy’s and may have even been derivative of hers. This is not surprising considering their marital relationship, and does not rule out genuine faith, but while Joy’s faith was life-long, Bill rejected the faith after just a few years. In a letter to his son, David, several years after publication of his testimony he writes, “I am not a Christian and will probably never be one since I cannot understand the basic doctrines, nor accept them.”14 Bill began dabbling with Dianetics, the self-improvement philosophy of L. Ron Hubbard. Joy played along for a short period, but rejected the pseudoscience as harmful to her Christian faith. Bill also became fascinated with Zen Buddhism and began using Tarot cards and yoga for what he labeled “spiritual quests.” These new interests soon supplanted any faith he had in Jesus Christ. If Bill Gresham’s religious life was in turmoil, so was the Gresham marriage. Bill continued to drink heavily, but the most tragic blow to the marriage was

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his continuing infidelity in one-night stands and short-lived affairs. The unfaithful husband never tried to hide these indiscretions, and wondered why Joy was so hurt by them. On the contrary, Bill took a macho pride in these indiscretions. Without shame or remorse, he told Chad Walsh one summer in Vermont that “a guy has to recharge his batteries every so often.”15 In the midst of this struggle with her husband’s destructive lifestyle, Joy finished several writing projects, including a novel, Weeping Bay, that came out with Macmillan in early 1950. She also gave a lengthy interview to a reporter for the New York Post and he brought out a multi-part series of Joy’s testimony dubbed “Girl Communist.” Then, while writing a book-length JewishChristian interpretation of the Ten Commandments, she became gravely ill with jaundice. Her doctor ordered rest—preferably away from the pressures of her chaotic house and family. During this turmoil Joy received a cry for help from her first cousin, Ren´ee Pierce. Ren´ee had two little children, and an abusive and alcoholic husband. She had a desperate need to live apart from her estranged spouse until a divorce could be finalized. With no money and few alternatives, she threw herself on the Greshams for mercy. Joy took her in and after a few months Ren´ee enthusiastically agreed to oversee the household so Joy could get away for a rest. With financial help from her parents, Joy sailed for England in August, 1952. She secured a room in London with a friend, Phyllis Williams. In Phyllis’s quiet flat, Joy rested well, and put the finishing touches on Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments. While in London, Joy continued her correspondence with C. S. Lewis, or Jack as his friends called him, and their first face-to-face meeting came in early September. Joy asked Jack to have lunch in Oxford with her and Phyllis at the dining room of the Eastgate Hotel, across from Magdalen College. Soon thereafter, the Oxford don invited Joy and her London host to have lunch with him and his brother Warren (“Warnie,” to those close to him). At the last minute Warnie backed out, so Jack, who was shy around women, invited his good friend and former student, George Sayer, in his brother’s place. Sayer later recalled that they had a delightful luncheon, and that he was impressed by Joy’s conversational skills, especially her keen wit. When Sayer inquired her impressions of England, her responses were artfully expressed and extremely funny, and “Jack laughed uproariously.”16 After lunch, the four went on a tour of the college, mostly walking in pairs (Jack and Joy were together). Their stimulating discussions continued, and Jack seemed to be impressed with her, because he continued to invite Joy to lunches to meet his brother and other colleagues.

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Indeed, there were several visits where Joy Gresham and Jack Lewis had opportunity to get better acquainted. Most telling, however, is that the Lewis brothers invited Joy to stay with them in their home, The Kilns, before returning to America. Her visit appears to have been well-received by both brothers. While in England, Joy laid out her problems back in the United States before Jack Lewis. He listened and grieved for her. During the four months Joy resided in London, Bill wrote from time to time keeping her informed about the boys, but Joy found his letters somewhat cold. Just before her return, he wrote and announced that he and Ren´ee were in love and having an affair. He wondered if Joy would consider living under the same roof despite the changed circumstances, and he offered what he termed the “optimum solution” to the children’s needs. The “solution,” he wrote, was that Joy “be married to some really swell guy, Renee and I to be married, both families to live in easy calling distance so that the Gresham kids could have Mommy and Daddy on hand.” If this was not callous enough, he added, “obviously there is a question of your cooperation in this ideal solution.”17 Joy received this letter with confusion as to what her obligation was to the marriage. She asked Jack his advice and later recounted to a friend that “he strongly advised me to divorce Bill.”18 Joy certainly took Lewis’s advice to heart, but she had little intention of following Bill’s advice. Nevertheless she returned to New York in January 1953 with some hope that the mess could be redeemed. Months of wrangling failed to bring reconciliation. Nine months after Joy returned Bill filed for divorce on grounds of her desertion when she went to England. In the meantime C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren, both of whom had grown extremely fond of Joy, urged her to return to England and bring the boys. Before Christmas she was back in England with David and Douglas. Joy lived in London for nearly two years, trying to support herself by freelance typing and writing in order to supplement Bill’s erratic child-support checks. The boys were placed in private schools thanks to the generosity of C. S. Lewis. For almost two years Joy and Jack visited one another regularly. The Lewis brothers not only built a relationship with Joy, but also her two sons Douglas and David. C. S. Lewis even had the boys read The Horse and His Boy from the Chronicles of Narnia series before it was published and dedicated it to them. This generous overture made the boys feel a bit more loved and welcomed despite being “strangers in a strange land.”19 Their friendship was growing to such a degree that when Joy’s financial situation worsened in August 1955, Lewis secured a place for her in Oxford, not far from his own home. He paid the rent20 and he and Warren plied her with manuscripts to edit and type.

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The status of Joy and Jack’s relationship at this point is unclear. Many of C. S. Lewis’s friends believed, and continue to believe, that Joy forced herself on Jack. They argue that she hounded him and in fact became a nuisance. Finally it was only Lewis’s pity for her and the children’s financial state that brought them together. There is some evidence to support this point of view. Joy, after all, arrived in London and initiated the first personal meeting with her spiritual mentor. But this is only part of the story. Both Lewis brothers, as well as George Sayer, found Joy to be stimulating company. And as Warren Lewis would point out, “Joy was the only woman [Jack] had met (although as his letters show, he had known with great affection many able women) who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and sense of fun.”21 Perhaps the less charitable view of Joy and Jack’s relationship come from Lewis’s friends who were not fond of Joy. They found her abrasive, arrogant, and generally difficult. Perhaps much of this was cultural, as her brash personal style may have gone unnoticed in New York, but taken for deliberate abrasiveness in England. What was seen as tough-minded but fair intellectual activity among Joy’s New York acquaintances was viewed as rudeness and vulgarity in some of Lewis’s Oxford circles.22 To make matters worse, Lewis’s friends began to realize the romantic element of the relationship, despite her being a divorced woman. All of these issues caused most of Lewis’s friends to take a dim view of the relationship. Regardless of their personal feelings, by Christmas 1955 it was apparent to everyone who knew them well that friendship had become love. Lewis visited Joy almost daily and she and the boys spent holidays and special occasions with Warren and Jack at their home, The Kilns. Because Joy was now a divorced woman, there was no impropriety—at least to their mind—for them to see one another on a regular basis. But Joy told her closest friends that although they frequently walked and held hands, marriage was out of the question. Because she was divorced even their friendship appeared scandalous to some people. In April 1956, the British Government, perhaps because of Joy Davidman’s previous Communist Party affiliation, refused to renew her visa. C. S. Lewis was devastated. How could this woman be sent back to the United States where her boys would possibly be abused by their alcoholic father who had more than once done them physical harm? And how could he manage without Joy nearby? She, after all, was the first woman with whom he had been truly close. She was his equal if not superior in intellect and they were the epitome of two people who truly were like iron sharpening iron. In the end, C. S. Lewis could not imagine living apart from Joy Davidman and the boys to whom he had become a father figure. He threw caution and

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appearances to the wind. In order to keep Joy and the boys in England, they quietly married in a civil ceremony on April 23, 1956. Now Joy and the boys could legally remain in England, as long as she wished. Only a handful of people knew of the civil ceremony, and Lewis seemed to be a bit ashamed of the arrangement. Furthermore, he desired more than merely a civil marriage service. He wanted Joy to be his wife and he wanted to blessing of the Church. He had initially hoped they could be married in the Anglican Church because to his mind a civil marriage was a legal convenience but not a real marriage. Lewis had sought the blessing of the Church on the grounds that Joy had legal grounds to be divorced and remarried due to Bill’s infidelity, and because Bill had been married prior to marrying Joy. Furthermore, neither Joy nor Bill were Christians when they were joined in a civil service years before. They hoped these factors would allow them to marry in the Anglican Church, but the Bishop of Oxford refused. Joy was divorced. The Church did not condone divorce and he would not give his blessing. Because Jack refused to see the civil ceremony as a true marriage, he and Joy lived apart but they continued to see one another. Indeed, they saw so much of one another that some people were critical of their relationship despite the fact that they honored the guidance of the Church. But everything changed in early 1957. As Joy was standing in her kitchen, her leg broke. With excruciating pain she was able to drag herself to a place where she could call for help. She was rushed to the hospital where x-rays and tests revealed that her body was full of cancer. C. S. Lewis’s doctor, Dr. Humphrey Havard, who tended to her at the hospital, recalled in the 1980s that she was dreadfully ill. There were malignant tumors in her breast and her bones were riddled with cancer. The doctor told Jack to prepare for her death. She could not live but a few days or weeks. Professor Lewis called in a favor from a man he had helped after World War II. Father Peter Bide, an Anglican priest with a parish just south of London, was purported to have the spiritual gift of healing. Lewis called him and asked if he would come up to Oxford, anoint Joy with oil, and pray for her. Father Bide arrived at Oxford at night. He and Jack talked about Joy’s situation at some length, and Lewis told him of Joy’s dying wish to be married in the Church. Father Bide recalled that he did not feel he could in good conscience deny this poor soul her dying wish, even though she was not in his diocese.23 Therefore, the next day, March 21, 1957, he anointed her with oil, prayed for healing, and then in the presence of Warren Lewis and one of the sisters at the hospital, he administered the sacraments of Holy Matrimony and Holy Communion. Within a few minutes an apparently dying Joy Davidman became Mrs. C. S. Lewis.

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Christian marriage was only the first unexpected effect of Joy’s illness. To the amazement of doctors and nurses, she made a rapid recovery when she was sent home from the hospital to die in the spring of 1957. After being bed-ridden for several months, she wrote in October: “I am slowly learning to walk again—I can get about the house with a cane and two-inch lift on my shoe. This is little short of a miracle considering in April I was given 2 months at the outside, could not shift myself in the bed and had only broken fragments of a thigh bone!”24 Lewis had been praying for months that he could take Joy’s illness upon himself that she might live in health. At the precise point the pain in Joy’s hip left her, Lewis began suffering from a bone disease that was diagnosed as osteoporosis. He told his friend and colleague Neville Coghill “of having been allowed to accept her pain.” Coghill inquired if he meant “that the pain left her, and that you felt it for her in your body?” Lewis replied, “Yes, . . . in my legs. It was crippling. But it relieved hers.”25 Jack told his friend Sheldon Vanauken how intriguing it was that while he was suffering from a calcium deficiency in his bones, “Joy who needed it [calcium] much more, was gaining it in hers.” But the cautious intellect added, “one must not be too fanciful.”26 In January 1958, Joy’s doctors shook their heads in bewilderment as they pronounced her cancer arrested. She went into a remission for two years. Throughout the convalescent period, Joy was worried about being a burden to the Lewis brothers. Their house had turned from a quiet home with two bachelors, to a home with two young children and a sick woman in a hospital bed with nurses attending to her needs. But on the contrary, Jack seems to have been delighted at how these new circumstances sharpened him. He wrote to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, “a new element of beauty as well as tragedy had entered my life. Certainly God has taken me at my word—I have for many years prayed, ‘Lord, take me out of myself, to seek and serve thee in others.’ ”27 The new marriage was a wonderful change for both the Lewis brothers and Joy and the children. Initially, Warren Lewis thought he would be an imposition on the marriage if he stayed at The Kilns with the newly wedded couple, so he made plans to move out. “But Jack and Joy would hear none of this,” Warren wrote, “so I decided to give the new regime a trial.” Rather than having uncomfortable changes often associated with such conditions, Warren found that the newcomers “enriched and enlivened” the home; and he wrote that her “company was an never-ending source of enjoyment . . .”28 For Jack and Joy the marriage was better than either of them could have ever hoped. For all of Lewis’s romantic ideas of love and joy that he found in literature, he never truly encountered them until he met Joy. That Joy had brought great happiness to Jack became evident in what he wrote to one

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friend: “it’s funny having at 59 the sort of happiness most men have in their twenties . . . [ellipses his] ‘Thou has kept the good wine till now.’”29 And for Joy’s part, she had found in her marriage to Jack what she never did receive from Bill Gresham. She found a deep love both for and from her new husband. She confided gleefully to author and friend Bel Kaufman concerning love, “The movies and the poets are right: it does exist!”30 Joy’s newfound health enabled her to continue work on some of her writing. She worked on a manuscript entitled The Seven Deadly Virtues but it was never finished. She also outlined a biography of Madame de Maintenon, the secret wife of Louis XIV, which Warren encouraged her to write. These unfinished projects aside, Joy poured herself into serving Jack and Warnie. Besides overseeing the house, she devoted much of her time and energy to editing and typing the writings of Jack and Warren. She also set out to renovate The Kilns as it had not been redecorated since the Lewis brothers moved in about 30 years earlier. In the summer of 1959, she and Jack were able to travel to Ireland and Wales, where Joy was able to see the land of Jack’s birth and to meet some of his relatives and life-long friends like Arthur Greeves. But when Joy returned, she began to have pain in her body that proved to be a return of her cancer. The cancer spread quickly throughout her body, but by April of 1960 the Lewises were determined to go on another trip. This time they would go to Greece, a land of history and culture, which had generated a language and literature they both admired. They made this memorable trip with their friends, June and Roger Lancelyn Green. The Lewis’s closest friends, the Greens and George and Moira Sayer, all said that she showed no signs of poor health except some edema. Joy knew that this trip endangered her health, but she was determined to enjoy life to the fullest for whatever time she had left. Indeed, Joy and Jack’s friends said they were like two school-aged youth who were cutting up and having a wonderful time. When they returned home, Joy only had three months before she would succumb to the vicious cancer that spread throughout her body. Despite her physical pain, Joy had much peace. She knew that her children would be in good hands with Jack and Warren rather than having to return to New York to be with their birth father, William Gresham. She also basked in the joy of love she and Jack shared for several glorious years. The relationship of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman lasted only a decade. She first wrote to Jack in January 1950. Joy died in July 1960 and her ashes (she requested cremation) were scattered over a rose garden at the Headington crematorium. Although it is impossible to quantify the impact of any loving relationship, there is massive evidence to show that these two pilgrims were unusually important to one another. On Jack’s part, his early books had helped

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Joy come to faith in Christ. His letters and their personal relationship helped her mature spiritually in Christ, and he helped her to develop professionally as a writer. Lewis helped Joy sharpen Smoke on the Mountain. He also wrote a Foreword for the British edition, helped promote the book, and intervened to secure her a good contract with a British publisher. On her part, Joy had an impact on C. S. Lewis that has seldom been recognized. Lewis admitted that when she and boys came into his life it was extremely difficult for an aging bachelor to have an instant family in his house. But the result was that both he and Warren were forced outside of themselves, which was precisely what these self-centered bachelors needed. Beyond such intangible benefits, Joy helped Lewis with his writing. She wrote to one person that she increasingly felt called to give up her own writing so that she could assist Jack in his work.31 As a result, in 1956 she enthusiastically talked him out of a writer’s block so he could begin writing again. Her encouragement played a major role in his writing Till We Have Faces, which Lewis believed was his best book, and most students of his books agree. He unabashedly dedicated this classic to Joy Davidman and many saw her in the novel’s character Orual. Lewis had given up writing nonfiction and apologetical books after he published Miracles in 1947. Some people have argued it was because Elizabeth Anscombe so devastatingly attacked a part of the book. In any case, Joy Davidman pushed him to take up nonfiction once more, prodding him to write Reflections on the Psalms, which was published in 1958. A careful reader will also find Joy’s fingerprints on several of his other works, all the way from the double-meaning title of Surprised by Joy to the Chronicles of Narnia where in The Last Battle Tirian refers to Jill as “comrade,” an unnatural term for Lewis, but one that Joy had continued to use ever since her earlier affiliation with the Communist Party. But the clearest evidence of her impact on his thinking and writing is in The Four Loves and A Grief Observed. Lewis might have written The Four Loves without Joy as his wife, but it would have been much less profound and certainly more theoretical than experiential. He admitted in that work that previously he could only recognize medieval love as a literary phenomenon, but his marriage to Joy gave him an intimate understanding of this romanticized love.32 And finally A Grief Observed, which was written in response to Joy’s death, could never have been written without the love and pain of Jack’s life with Joy. To the point, Lewis believed that Joy helped complete him as a person, and she acknowledged that he did the same for her. In the final analysis, then, those of us who thank God for the way C. S. Lewis has been our teacher through his books, must also be grateful for Joy Davidman Lewis. Without her the Lewis collection would be less complete.

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NOTES 1. Joy Davidman, “The Longest Way Round,” in David Wesley Soper, ed., These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1951), 16. 2. Oliver Pilat, “Girl Communist,” New York Post, October 31–November 13, 1949. 3. Howard Davidman, interview by Lyle W. Dorsett, New York, July 21–22, 1981. Transcript available at Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 4. Ibid. 5. Stephen Vincent Ben´et, Forward to Letter to a Comrade (New Haven: Yale UP, 1938). 6. Pilat, “Girl Communist.” 7. Davidman, “The Longest Way Round,” 22. 8. Ibid, 21–22. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. Pilat, “Girl Communist.” 14. William Lindsay Gresham to Davy (David Gresham), June 26, 1962. Available at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 15. Chad Walsh, interview by Lyle W. Dorsett, Lake Iroquois, Vermont, July 23, 1981. Transcript available at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 16. Professor George Sayer, interview by Lyle W. Dorsett, August 7, 1981, Malvern, England. Transcript available at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 17. William Lindsay Gresham to Joy Davidman, n.d., 1952, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 18. Joy Davidman to Chad Walsh, January 27, 1950, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 19. Joy Davidman to William Lindsay Gresham, December 22, 1953, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 20. Douglas Gresham, interview by Lyle W. Dorsett, June 2–5, 23–25, 1982, Boulder, CO, and Wheaton, IL. Transcript available at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 21. W. H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 23. 22. George Sayer, interview by Lyle W. Dorsett; Sheldon Vanauken to Lyle W. Dorsett, June 10, 1981, and phone interview June 19, 1981. The Reverend Walter Hooper was helpful to me (LD) on this subject when I interviewed him at Oxford on August 5, 1981. Transcripts available at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL.

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23. The Reverend Peter W. Bide, interview by Lyle W. Dorsett, September 17, 1981. Transcript available at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 24. Joy Davidman to William Lindsay Gresham, October 31, 1957, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 25. Neville Coghill, “The Approach to English,” in Joycelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 63. 26. Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 227–228. 27. C. S. Lewis to Dom Bede Griffiths, August 1, 1957, Lewis Letters, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 28. W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” Letters of C. S. Lewis, 22. 29. C. S. Lewis to Sister Penelope, February 12, 1958, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 30. Bel Kaufman sent Lyle Dorsett copies of her diary dated August 25— 27, 1957. LD interviewed Ms. Kaufman on the telephone, December 22, 1981, and she wrote a lengthy letter of reminiscences dated December 5, 1981, the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 31. Joy Davidman to William Lindsay Gresham, April 29, 1955, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL. 32. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), 154.

BIBLIOGRAPHY All letters, interviews, and articles cited in this essay can be found at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Davidman, Joy. Anya. New York: Macmillan, 1940. ———. Letter to a Comrade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938. ———. “The Longest Way Round.” In David Wesley Soper, ed. These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1951. ——— Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1954. ———. Weeping Bay. New York: Macmillan, 1950. ———, ed. War Poems of the United Nations. Three hundred poems, one hundred and fifty poets from twenty countries. Sponsored by the League of American writers. New York: Dial Press, 1943. Dorsett, Lyle W. A Love Observed: Joy Davidman’s Life and Marriage to C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1998. Originally published as And God Came In. New York: Macmillan, 1983. ———. Seeking the Secret Place: The Spiritual Formation of C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004. Gresham, Douglas. Lenten Lands. New York: Macmillan, 1988.

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Gresham, William Lindsay. Nightmare Alley. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1946. Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960. ———. A Grief Observed. Greenwich, CT: Seabury Press, 1963. ———. Reflections on the Psalms. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: G. Bles, 1955. ———. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957. Lewis, W. H., ed. Letters of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Pilat, Oliver. “Girl Communist.” New York Post, October 31–November 13, 1949. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994. Soper, David Wesley, ed. These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1951. Walsh, Chad. C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics. New York: Macmillan, 1949.

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A Grief Observed: C. S. Lewis Meets the Great Iconoclast Alice H. Cook

The picture of C. S. Lewis that emerges from the various biographies of him crafted in the last quarter century suggest a portrait of a fascinating and complex man. Aside from his lauded writing and academic achievements his personal life has become as interesting and, in certain respects, more inspiring than the public and professional persona now so well known. The many profound friendships he enjoyed throughout his life have been well-documented; the Inklings gathering of fellow scholars and writers in Oxford, which regularly included J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, his brother, Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, and Owen Barfield, is perhaps the best known of Lewis’s cadre of friendships. In the accounts of Lewis’s friends, his brother, his students, and the many people he corresponded with, we see his warmth, his intelligence, his wit, his candor, his humility, and his care. We witness a focused obedience to the God he served. Interestingly, however, this very gregarious and outspoken man, chose to keep many personal matters to himself. So it is with some awe and amazement that readers of C. S. Lewis learn of the existence of a diary, an entr´e into a very intimate and transparent disclosure of his experience with grief and the marriage to Joy Davidman that preceded it. A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, offers the reader the most personal encounter with a grieving C. S. Lewis imaginable.

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THE TIMES OF JOY On July 13, 1960, Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis died. The impact that the life and death Helen Joy Davidman Lewis had on C. S. Lewis is a subject that has morphed from the highly personal and private experience of a 62-year-old man in specific time—the 1950s—and in a specific place—Oxford, England—into a legendary romance in print and on screen. And at the time, few people outside of Lewis’s closest circle of friends even knew he was married. Who was this “mysterious” American woman who made her way into the world—and heart—of Oxford’s most famous, most confirmed bachelor? Helen Joy Davidman was born in 1915 in New York City to Ukrainian Jewish parents. She was educated at Hunter College and received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University. A voracious reader from her earliest years, she was an astute and tough-minded young woman who gave serious thought to zeitgeist and worldview as well as political and social theory from an early age. By fifteen, not unlike a certain Belfast boy, she considered herself an atheist and, later, as a young adult, became a member of the Communist Party. Along the way, her considerable literary talents developed into a writing career after a brief period of teaching English. Her book of free verse, Letter to a Comrade, won the Loines Memorial Fund award given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her second work, Anya, a novel, published in 1940, reflected her Ukrainian heritage. During this period she tried also her hand at scriptwriting in Hollywood, but did not find it to be a receptive environment. She returned to New York in the fall of 1939, where she worked as a writer, editor, and critic for the Communist Party.1 Then in 1942 she met fellow Communist party member, Bill Gresham. Bill’s first marriage had recently ended, due to his alcoholism, depression, and compulsive infidelities. Joy and Bill courted and then were married in August 1942. The Greshams’ involvement in Communism waned early in their marriage. During this period Bill’s writing career enjoyed some success. They settled into a new home in Upstate New York and Bill commuted to New York City where he was employed as a magazine editor. The couple over time became the parents of two sons, David, born in 1944, and Douglas, born in 1945. Bill’s assorted problems caused distress in their marriage. One particularly frightening episode in 1946 involved Bill phoning Joy from New York City, telling her that he feared he was going mad and that he would not go home, although he did not know where he would go. Joy was terrified of what Bill might do in his agitated state of mind. In the midst of this traumatic moment she went down on her knees and prayed for the first time in her life. Her

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testimony was that she felt the presence of God with her in a most definite way. It was then that she began to embrace belief in God.2 When Bill eventually returned home, she relayed her experience to him and he purportedly found her story very compelling. He joined her in an intense spiritual quest and before long they both began to embrace Christianity, and began attending a Presbyterian church in their community. In 1948, Bill himself desperately sought relief from his alcoholism, becoming devout in his faith, and over the next three years he remained sober. In 1951, Joy and Bill Gresham each published accounts of their conversion to Christianity separately in a Protestant anthology entitled These Found the Way.3 In fact, Christianity was just one of several spiritual paths Bill explored in the early 1950s; others included Buddhism, I Ching, and later, Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics—now referred to as Scientology.4 Joy, however, was growing increasingly certain that her commitment to Christ and Christian teachings was valid and the basis on which she would live her life. Her readings on Christianity eventually led her to the writings of the prolific C. S. Lewis, and she took great interest in his views on everything and anything. In 1949 she happened to attend a lecture on Jungian psychology and religion given by a British theologian, Father Victor White. Afterward she asked Fr. White if he knew Lewis, and how difficult did he think it would be meet him. White advised her that meeting him might not be easy, but that writing to Lewis might prove a successful way of contacting him.5 Another friend of Joy’s, the poet and Lewis enthusiast, Chad Walsh, also encouraged Joy to write to Lewis. In January, 1950, the first letter from Joy to Lewis arrived at the Kilns. The sharp wit and insight she displayed in her letters distinguished her from the many fan letters he received. He quickly came to anticipate and enjoy their correspondence very much. Lewis’s friend and biographer George Sayer writes in Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis that once the correspondence started, “Joy began to consider how she could visit Oxford without much expense and without making her main motive crudely obvious. She acquired a pen pal, Phyllis Williams, who lived in London, and received an invitation to stay with her for some of the time that she was in England.”6 Sayer explains further that Joy, “desperately wanted advice from Jack about her marriage. She also wanted to discuss with him the book she was writing on the Ten Commandments.”7 In early 1952, Joy’s younger cousin, Renee Pierce, was fleeing an alcoholic husband with her two young children and found safe harbor in the Gresham household. Renee willingly took charge of the Gresham home and cared for the Gresham boys, then six and seven, permitting Joy thus to embark on what would become a fateful six-month holiday in England. Upon arriving in London, Joy resumed her correspondence with Lewis, and in early September invited him to meet

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her and Phyllis Williams for lunch in Oxford at the Eastgate Hotel across from Magdalen College. Jack, as Lewis preferred to be called, quickly reciprocated and invited her to a luncheon at Magdalen College at Oxford. At a third luncheon, Warnie, Lewis’s brother, finally met Joy. During the fall of 1952, Lewis and Joy became fast friends. There is strong consensus among biographers that Joy came to England already infatuated with Lewis and had romantic hopes from the start. Lewis biographer Michael White reports that Joy had told friends that she “had already mentally ‘married’ Jack some time before she met him in the flesh.”8 Those who were close to Jack at this time have recorded a fair mix of reactions and observations of Jack’s reaction to Joy. Sayer, for example, noted that Jack was without question attracted to her from the start and greatly enjoyed her wit and company.9 It can also be inferred that he may have been put off by her brazenness at times, but he apparently enjoyed her company enough to invite her to spend Christmas with him and Warnie.10 Joy accepted the invitation and spent two weeks in December, 1952, at the Lewis’ home, the Kilns. In a somewhat melodramatic turn of events while staying at the Kilns, Joy received a letter from her husband, informing her that he and Renee were in love and suggested that he and Joy divorce. Lewis had learned from Joy of Bill’s volatile temper toward her and their sons, as well as of Bill’s infidelity, and it was Lewis’s advice that she proceed with the divorce. Initially, Joy was unwilling to do so out of her Christian convictions, but after she returned to the United States in January and understood the unsavory circumstances, she soon agreed to the divorce. By the following November she and her sons moved to London, where she enrolled them in Dane Court, a Surrey prep school. Bill’s financial contribution for supporting her sons was sporadic and, according to Sayers, “The bills from Dane Court were probably paid by the charitable trust that Jack had had set up and into which he paid a considerable part of his literary earnings.”11 In 1954, the Greshams’ divorce was finalized and then in the summer of 1955, Joy and her sons moved into a house in Oxford that Jack rented for them. In that same year, Joy’s book Smoke on the Mountain was published with a foreword written by Lewis. Lewis was finishing his Chronicles of Narnia during this period as well as working on what would become The Four Loves and Till We Have Faces, with both books bearing considerable influence from Joy. On a nearly daily basis, Lewis was visiting Joy, often to discuss his writing projects. Lewis confided in Arthur Greeves as early as September, 1955, that he was considering marrying Joy for solely legal purposes, to enable her and her sons to continue living in Britain. In the spring of 1956, when the Home Office denied Joy permission to stay in Britain, Lewis went ahead with a civil marriage to Joy.

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Very few of Lewis’s friends had any knowledge of their marriage and Lewis insisted that it was one of formality only. In recounting a visit to Oxford during the summer of 1956, Sayer reports that Lewis tells him that the marriage had made no change in their relationship. Sayer, however, sensed that Joy was pushing her way toward installing herself and her sons at the Kilns. According to a conversation Sayer had that summer with Lewis, “he positively was not in love with her at this time.”12 Or, at least, that was what he said. His feelings for Joy during this period will likely remain ambiguous. In early fall of 1956, Joy was informed that she would no longer be able to rent the flat she was staying in, and it was then the Lewises decided that she and her sons would move into the Kilns. Soon their circumstances began to involve issues of a more practical nature than questions of romantic love, Christian ethics, or even charity—as Joy began experiencing pains in her body. A severe fall resulted in her admission to the hospital and led to the diagnosis of bone cancer. The spectre of death galvanized Lewis’s feelings for Joy. In facing this tragic news he realized, perhaps for the first time, that he was, indeed, in love with Joy. Interestingly, his thoughts at this time turned to the subject of the Medieval romantic love he had written about as a scholar. The powerful feelings of beauty mixed with tragedy filled his heart and mind where cool analysis had previously reigned. The coming months were filled with operations and radiation treatments. It was a gut-wrenching season and Joy’s chances for recovery appeared slim. The severity of Joy’s illness made the status of their marriage an even more prominent issue. It became important in Jack and Joy’s thinking to have their marriage solemnized before God, but Joy’s status as a divorced woman made it difficult to find an Anglican priest to perform the ceremony.13 Lewis sought out a friend and former student, Fr. Peter Bide, to lay hands on Joy for healing. Bide agreed to do so and on the night before he was to go to hospital to pray for Joy, he and Jack spoke at length about the situation and their desire to be married within the Anglican church. Now aware of Jack and Joy’s desire for a Christian wedding, he offered to perform the ceremony, even without the blessing of the local bishop, who, because Joy had been divorced, had withheld his sanction. On March 21, 1957, a bedside wedding was performed with Warnie and a nun as witnesses in Wingfield Hospital.14 In April, Joy came home to the Kilns to spend what was believed to be her last days. Lewis was expecting his role of newly wed husband to be exchanged for that of widower in a brief period of time, but to everyone’s amazement Joy began to slowly regain strength and vitality. Early tests proved that her cancer had ceased to spread and, as the summer progressed, they started to see healing of the cancerous spots and mending of the fractured femur. A wonderful miracle had taken place and Joy Lewis’s cancer was in

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remission. Strangely, as Joy’s bones repaired themselves, there was a diagnosis of osteoporosis for Jack in the summer of 1957. His bones were weakening at an alarming rate just as Joy was regaining some mobility with the aid of a cane. But, by 1958, Jack was feeling much better after having calcium treatments, and the year proved to be an almost idyllic time for the couple. Jack wanted very much to show her his homeland, so they went by plane to vacation in Ireland and Wales that summer. Joy’s health continued to improve and she devoted herself to making improvements at the Kilns, even working in the garden, as well as acting as secretary for Lewis in Warnie’s absence. Most of 1959 passed without incident. However, in October Joy’s followup tests showed that the cancer had returned. The news devastated both Joy and Jack. They knew they had been granted a special reprieve, and now they would have to face the recurrence of the disease head on. Though Joy was dealing with increased discomfort, they managed a dreamed of 11-day trip to Greece with Roger and June Lancelyn Green in April 1960. Seeing the beauty of the Mediterranean made this a very special vacation for Jack and Joy, as they shared a love for ancient history and reading the classics. Upon returning to England, Joy resumed treatments for cancer at the hospital and underwent a mastectomy. She seemed to convalesce well for several weeks back at the Kilns, and engaged in as much activity as her wheelchair and failing strength permitted. On June 20, she was admitted to Ackland nursing home as her illness and the side effects of her treatment became overwhelming. She had great determination to rise above the pain and her success allowed her to go to home once again on June 27. She and Jack dined out on July 3 and she went to Cottswald with her nurse the next day. But the disease and the pain quickly overcame her, and on July 13, 1960, Joy died. Joy’s death set in motion the beginning of the end of Jack’s own life. Though he lived another three years, this period could be described as a prolonged conclusion to a very full life. In many ways, the last decade of Jack’s life was his zenith, made possible largely by the entrance of Joy into his life. OBSERVING GRIEF : C. S. LEWIS’S SKILLFUL MEMOIR A Grief Observed is Lewis’s naked, poignant account of dealing with the hope, misery, determination, and anguish that accompanied the final resolution of his wife Joy’s terminal illness. The profound mourning he shared with his stepsons, and brother, open the door to enter into Lewis’s world of grief. The feelings and emotions that which Lewis kept intensely private all of his adult life are fully on display here. That he chose to reveal them first in a private diary, and then in a pseudonymous publication, indicates the release

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it represented to him, and also forecast the catharsis he hoped to share with the common reader. He writes A Grief Observed not so the public can understand him better, but so they can understand the grief process with insider knowledge, knowledge hard won and tempered by a transcendent faith. We meet him where he is, in the present tense, in the physical body, in the world of sensations. He speaks of flutterings in the stomach, yawning, swallowing, feeling drunk, or concussed. He describes the blanket that exists between him and the world. Reading this journal-style recounting of his ordeal is a clear demonstration of the fact that grief is, above all, a process. The reader witnesses the moment by moment range of thoughts and emotions and the eventual acquiescence that lead to the tempered resolution he experiences. The first section of the book places the reader squarely in the midst of Lewis’s grief. We glimpse how he feels, what his interactions are like, what goes through his mind. The first verb in A Grief Observed is “felt.” He rouses from his stupor of dysfunction and addresses his state through the route of the senses. Reason tells him to get perspective and cope. But he is undone by a memory that makes reason vanish like “an ant in the mouth of a furnace.”15 He is debilitated by this wave of emotion. Tearful and maudlin, he finds his reaction both distasteful and self-absorbed so he shifts his focus back to H., short for “Helen,” Joy’s given first name, his now lost lover in A Grief Observed. He notes some recurring images and qualities of their time together, reliving moments that comfort and torture. His emotional state is met by her intellect, which is described as lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. His sentimentality is met with her intolerance of his talking nonsense. As he reviews his sensations and experience, he is chided by the memory of H. sobering and objective point of view. He describes what life is now like, what effort it takes to continue with simple tasks such as letter writing or reading. He comments on the laziness of grief, the sloth, the lack of care. To shave or not shave? It doesn’t matter, nothing does. Next Lewis moves to introduce the subject of God. Where does God fit into all this? What is His stance? Where is he when you need him the most? You only find a “door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that silence . . . Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”16 His real fear, however, is not that he might stop believing in God, but that his understanding of God might be something altogether different than he had previously thought. “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”17 The easy answer is to think that he is absent because he doesn’t exist. The problem then becomes: Why did God seem so real when we didn’t really need Him?

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Again Lewis returns to his marriage as a reference point for thinking about God. Marriage convinced him that religion is not a substitute for sex, for if that were true then he would have lost interest in God all together. His description of his physical relationship with H. is followed by the affirmation that he and H. both knew that they had a desire for something besides the other person, something completely different. He describes his interactions with others at this time, beginning with his stepsons, who are embarrassed by grief and all references he makes to their mother. Their reaction reminds him of his feelings of embarrassment when his own mother died. He notes how the act of reflecting on misery becomes an aspect of misery itself—how one gets caught up in the fact that they are in misery and that compounds their awareness and experience of it. Does writing about it make it worse? He feels that he “must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down . . . I believe I get a little outside it.”18 So we see how he moves from introspection and self-analysis to attempts at languid objectivity, entry to entry. He returns again to his interactions with the outside world. He perceives that he brings embarrassment and awkwardness to all he comes in contact with. He notes the discomfort others feel in his presence and their inner debate about whether to bring “it” (H.’s death) up or not; even worse, he recognizes that he is seen as “death’s head” to the happily married. The daily activities bring their own challenges. Does he avoid all reminders of H.? He notes his interaction with things he expects to be painful, like their favorite places or foods. To his surprise it makes no difference. Her absence is no more or no less painful in the familiar than in the unfamiliar. “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”19 His keenest sense of her absence is in his own body. His body has lost its significance since it no longer is the body of H.’s lover. Cancer has long been his enemy: first in the case of his mother, then his father and now his wife. Like war or unhappiness, no one ever meets cancer straight on, but only in the way it impacts the hours of his life. The battle is characterized by ups and downs, hours and days, composed of good and bad moments. He provides glimpses of these without overwhelming the reader with the details of her suffering. Of his last night with his wife he writes, “How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!”20 He misses her voice; remembering her voice is easier than say, her face, and therefore more painful. Yet, as he reflects, there are limits on the oneness experienced in marriage, there are limits to being “one flesh” and sharing

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the pain of your partner. In the final analysis each individual is on her own separate path. Separation is inevitable and the reality and solitude of death is inescapable and irrevocable. So ends the first section of A Grief Observed, in which the reader is introduced to the grief of the author along with the pain, the frustration, and the hollowness felt by him. Lewis describes his wife as a woman who found joy late in life and possessed an insatiable capacity for enjoying everything around her. He tries to think about H. more than his grief, but this proves frustrating. He knows that in remembering her he cannot help but be selective. The composite of elusive images of her yield the inevitable result of an “imaginary woman.” Memories, he sighs, do not do justice to living people, and certainly they cannot access the real personality of the deceased. When compared with other losses in his life, and here Lewis alludes to the death of his good friend Charles Williams, H. oddly seems more like a non-entity than do the others. Why is this? He speculates that it is because the trustworthiness of the matter is so much more serious in the case of H. One’s trust in a fact is inversely related to how essential it is that the fact is trustworthy. “Only a real risk tests the reality of belief.”21 He faces the unrelenting truth of the fact that she is dead. She does not exist any longer in space and time. And time itself he reckons as another name for death. Can he find comfort or hope in a future reunion? He doesn’t think it works like that. Reality doesn’t repeat. Anything like the “happy past restored” does not exist, yet it is precisely what he wants most.22 He draws no comfort in the fact that she is in God’s hands or that she no longer suffers. He counters the former platitude with the fact that she was always in God’s hands, and that fact did not spare her from pain or disease. Nor does he believe that death has freed her from suffering. He intimates a purgatorial view of the afterlife, where human failings and imperfections continue to be redressed and the body and soul refined. Furthermore, he calls into question whether God is, indeed, good. What is his nature really? And can human beings understand it? Is good even a valid concept? Is God a cosmic sadist or heartless vivisectionist? In his struggle to make sense out of the experience of grief he comes to realize that, “Only torture will bring out truth, only under torture does he discover it himself.”23 He likens his faith to a house of cards and summarizes that the sooner it is knocked down, the better. Her death has knocked down his house of cards. All that he wrote about in the second journal was an expression born out of hatred. He was receiving the only satisfaction available, the “satisfaction of hitting back.” Then, “I begin to see. My love for H. was of much the same quality as my faith in God . . . Whether there was anything but imagination

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in the faith, or anything but egoism in the love, God knows. I don’t. There may have been a little more; especially in my love for H. But neither was the thing I thought it was. A good deal of the card-castle about both.”24 Lewis then begins to wonder aloud if God is not a veterinarian, but rather a vivisectionist. “The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.”25 He likens the sufferings we go through to God’s surgical treatment by which we experience healing. Now we find Lewis in a phase where his anger is less intense and the world less blurred by tears, but diminished also is H., despite her overpowering presence in his thoughts. And now, when he is not looking for it, he senses her presence. As he puts it, “You can’t, in most cases, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway you can’t get the best out of it.”26 He describes the wonder, complexity, and breadth of his relationship to H. and wonders if it was “too perfect to last.”27 He speculates that perhaps their relationship pleased God so well that God passed them onto the next level, bereavement. Bereavement, he suggests, is a natural part of the marital union, regardless of which role you find yourself in. “If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is an integral and universal part of our experience of love.”28 His thoughts return to the trial of his faith. He now sees it was a house of cards. God in his mercy knocked it down to reveal its quality to him. Earlier in the book he speaks of grief in tones shaded by shame and embarrassment, but as his journey moves on, he faces his demons with less apology, even to H. He allows God to show him the truth of these things and accepts himself as he is. He warns against over emphasizing the deadness of one’s spouse, that ritualistic focus placed on them is counterproductive. He remarks that, “The less I mourn her, the nearer I seem to her.”29 In part four, Lewis reports that he has made some gains in the process of grief. “Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that door, turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum—not all that fuss about my mental image of her.”30 His perspective has shifted to recognize the role of praise in dealing with grief. “Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of him as the giver, of her as the gift . . . by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.”31 He speaks of images and of the danger of regarding them as sacrosanct. In his circumstance God has intervened and not permitted the image of something holy to become a Holy image. “My idea of God is not a divine

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idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast.”32 The same is true of all reality; the real will always shatter the mental images one possesses. Lewis eventually comes to a repentant state where he essentially lets go of all his struggles, recognizing them for what they are—traps and problems of his own making. He writes that he knows the “two great commandments and I’d better get on with them.”33 As he closes, he describes meeting H. in a new fashion with “an intimacy that had not passed through the senses or the emotions at all.”34 THE SEASON OF GRIEF Although his relationship with Joy came late in Lewis’s life, his sense of loss and grief was intense and terrible. In the weeks and months following her death, he wrote of his experience frankly and without reservation. He detailed his struggles, his pain, and, certainly, his questions and fears. The published version of this examination of one widower’s dark night of the soul is an extremely short work, coming in its first publication at only sixty-three pages. Lewis did not tell his friends he was working on this book, and probably only old friends Roger Lancelyn Green and Sheldon Vanauken knew of the project; it is likely that T. S. Eliot, then the director of the publishing house Faber & Faber, also knew of Lewis’s project.35 Those close to Lewis said he felt the death of Joy very deeply. He continued his regular activities but with less zest in the year that followed Joy’s death. Biographers, such as Humphrey Carpenter, note that he still made the occasional turnout at a local pub, the Lamb and the Flag,3 and Sayer states how he looked forward to lunch with his friends.4 But the most eloquent and insightful observation comes from his stepson, Doug Gresham: It has been said that Jack’s years at Cambridge after Mother’s death were happy. That is not true. Jack, when in company with his friends and colleagues, was (after a while) again the jovial, witty intellectual they had known for years, but only Warnie and I knew what effort that cost him, and Warnie knew less than I, for Jack was careful with Warnie: I was more invisible. Jack’s colleagues and friends never saw him as he turned from waving a cheery good-bye at the door of The Kilns and casting some pearls of a parting witticism to a departing guest; they never watched him suddenly slump, his whole body shrinking like a slowly deflating balloon, his face losing the light of laughter and becoming grey, until he became once more a tired, sick and grieving man, old beyond his years. Even Warnie did not know, but boys are sometimes hard to see, and many times I watched Jack, unseen by him, as he walked, his mind clear, through the pain of his own Gethsemane. On his way to Warnie’s study, tray in hand, he would stop, take a deep breath, pull back his shoulders, raise his head and bring

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his facial expression under control, then, bold and cheerful of countenance, he would step into the study with a glad cry of “Tea, Brother.”36

Numerous Lewis scholars and biographers include testimony from A Grief Observed as evidence of the pain and despair that characterized Jack’s grief, and certainly not a work of mere fiction. Without qualification, works such as Chad Walsh’s The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, William Griffin’s Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life, Brian Sibley’s The Shadowlands, Peter Kreeft’s The Shadowlands of C. S. Lewis, and George Sayer’s Jack all draw directly from A Grief Observed to describe Lewis’s condition. These biographers would be grossly misrepresenting their subject if there was reason to believe that A Grief Observed was not the heartfelt struggles of a bereaved husband, but rather, as some earnest Lewis scholars have argued, an intentionally crafted imaginative work. To be sure, there are competing, sometimes contradictory statements about the exact nature of Jack and Joy’s relationship offered by those who knew them both. Some accounts may be said to be trying too hard to sidestep the unattractive truth that these were real people, flaws and all. Joy’s motives for getting to know Lewis might have included some inappropriate ones, but there is little subtlety about Joy’s approach to the relationship. More uncertain, however, was the degree of Jack’s emotional attachment to Joy at varying stages of the relationship. Some have wondered if the marriage was indeed “real” or a manufactured romance had been added to their relationship. Walter Hooper’s early treatment of Lewis as “the perpetual virgin” bears much responsibility for turning this into a topic of interest.37 Hooper’s assertions combined with his status as a Lewis expert has compelled many subsequent writers on Lewis to speculate about the topic. For instance, Hooper has gone to considerable lengths to support the theory that Jack and Joy did not consummate their marriage. The complexities of Joy’s citizenship status followed by her health issues provide some grounds for speculating that theirs was a marriage of convenience only. Yet the pervading feeling from all who were close to Lewis was that Jack and Joy’s marriage was a true union of husband and wife. And then there is the author’s word: in A Grief Observed Jack speaks very openly of the physical nature of his marriage. But Hooper reports that Lewis claimed otherwise. In Sleuthing C. S. Lewis, Kay Lindskoog relays what Hooper had to say about A Grief Observed: “According to Hooper, he read the book straight through while Lewis smoked his pipe and watched; then Lewis explained that this book was not really an autobiographical account by a bereaved husband. It was pure fiction. Lewis had pretended it was a true story so people would be helped by it, but he

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had also pretended he was N. W. Clerk so people wouldn’t think it was his own true story.”38 When asked in a 1988 correspondence about the passage in the Lewis biography co-authored by Roger Green and Walter Hooper, in which is written, “in A Grief Observed, a collection of almost daily thoughts and attempts at self-analysis jotted down during the first few months after her death . . . The possibility of its publication was mentioned under the pledge of secrecy to Green, who stayed at the Kilns for several days at the beginning of 1960 . . .” Hooper’s response was that the passage was “written by Green, who knew it was not true.”39 Such an explanation is confusing to be sure, but what’s more problematic is Hooper’s suggestion that Lewis and Joy had only a “marriage of convenience,” something that undermines the themes and integrity of A Grief Observed and potentially robs much of the power, drama, and personal truth from the work. Other writers have disarmed A Grief Observed by constructing various objections to it as a legitimate record of Lewis’s experience with grief. Lewis scholar Peter Schakel, writes in his book, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis, that A Grief Observed is fiction. His “hard” evidence is primarily Walter Hooper’s word and the fact that no notebooks have ever been found. He does, however, provide an elaborate stylistic argument for deeming it fiction: “Lewis wrote what was—in its published form, at any rate—a fictional diary, and used in it a ‘persona,’ an imaginary ‘diarist’ through whom he could express himself . . . and great caution should be used in treating the book as a source of information about Lewis’s life or marriage. In its form it was an imaginative book, one for which matters of historical factuality are not relevant.”40 Schakel maintains that Lewis very intentionally selected the fictional diary as the form for this writing exercise. He describes the task of writing A Grief Observed as a meticulously crafted project. Every detail, he believes, was consciously chosen, from its brevity to its monosyllabic cadence, all the while maintaining in it an intimacy and emotional truth. For Schakel, this argument fits nicely in his exploration of Lewis attaining a balanced interaction of the subjective with the objective: “Lewis appears to be attempting to integrate the objectivity he had long believed crucial to right thinking with the subjective element in reading. He remains a firm objectivist, but does so while granting that objectivism is not as simple and clear-cut in practice as it had seemed to him in the thirties and forties.”41 Lewis’s announced struggle with his perceptions of “H.” and the difficulty of identifying objective standards to assist him in the midst of his grief are taken by Schakel as evidence for his argument. Indeed, Lewis writes: “Until the writer was able to get past his selfish need of H. and his ideas about how he was to experience her presence, until his subjective projections could be broken by and reshaped by reality,

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he did not have a face, did not have a real and receptive means to meet and accept the face of her present being.”42 However, the valuable insights into A Grief Observed found in Schakel’s chapter, “Personal Writer of the Sixties,” are hampered by the minimization of the biographical authority of A Grief Observed and, even more so, by the assumption that someone writing about the pain of losing a spouse could be so calculating in the construction of his writing. If anything, the opposite ought to be true. The intentionality that Schakel’s “fictional diary” suggests does not fit with the common human experience of grief, characterized by lack of ambition, focus, or care. These are not the conditions, typically, when anyone does his best work, in any field. The type of creative energy that Schakel sees in the design and execution of A Grief Observed was not likely the product of a grieving widower. For a writer to deliberately select a sophisticated format and craft exquisite prose to elicit predefined reactions and provide a platform for examination and instruction of the subject of grief is a strategy hard to swallow, and contrary to most grief experiences. Perhaps the best argument against Schakel’s position comes from these lines from A Grief Observed: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort.”43 Some readers who greatly esteem Lewis’s spiritual insights, clarity, intelligence, humor, and warmth have been known to expect every facet of his life to have been virtuous, consistent, inoffensive, of the highest character, and without spiritual falter. For such readers, the portrait of Lewis as painted by Hooper and Schakel is designed to extend hope that the bitter uncertainties and spiritual agonies Lewis claimed to experience in his grief were indeed invented. Those wishing to think of Lewis as not susceptible to the harsh sentiments written in A Grief Observed should find the theory that it was written as a work of fiction attractive. But one would have to ignore most accounts of what Lewis was like at this time and also think that his relationship with Joy was not substantial enough to have caused a real grief, thus necessitating a fabricated grief. There is a fifty-one page copy of A Grief Observed written in Lewis’s hand as well as a typed copy at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, but there are no notebooks filled with the journal entries that are thought to have contained the source material for his book. Nevertheless, although no journal-style notebooks have been found, it should be noted that Lewis was a journal keeper and typically had spare notebooks lying about as he worked on projects. It would be the most natural thing for a person who was in the habit of chronicling his thoughts to keep the kind of notebooks described in A Grief Observed. And likewise, it is quite imaginable that after transcribing them into a publishable

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format Lewis might want to destroy the original, private, unedited struggles of his darkest hour. When the book was published, friends such as George Sayer had no doubt about either the book’s authorship or its veracity, and since its publication friends and biographers of Lewis have, with only a few exceptions, accepted the account of grief as an accurate portrayal of Lewis’s experience. THE MOST PERSONAL WRITING OF C. S. LEWIS Lewis’s The Problem of Pain discussed the universal questions of suffering, pain, and fallenness in theoretical terms. These were questions that Lewis knew troubled thoughtful people, questions that troubled him as well. This general discourse covered the topic of suffering evocatively and effectively, but with a distant and somewhat impersonal, philosophical perspective. Nothing could be more dissimilar from A Grief Observed. When reading this work, one recoils from the raw emotion and infectious gloom that is met with every turn of the page. If anything, it is painfully personal and overrun with specifics. A Grief Observed is Lewis’s most intimate writing. We see an author, who seldom let even his closest friends and family members have access to his private thoughts, open his soul to himself, to the world, to God. Chad Walsh called A Grief Observed Lewis’s most exposed personal writing. “It is feeling nakedly revealed in language stripped down and making no pretensions of elegance or eloquence, though by its very directness it achieves, in places, great power”; he further notes the Job-like quality of A Grief Observed, filled with “accusations and questions directed to a silent God.”44 As such, the book is a true window into Lewis the believer struggling to maintain and then emerging to embrace a chastened Christian worldview. Nowhere else will a reader get such an intimate portrait of the man, his marriage, his day-to-day outlook (atypical as it is at this time), or his faith. It covers questions very parallel to those in The Problem of Pain, but the personal has replaced the general, the heart has replaced the head. Nothing was more natural to Lewis than working through this painful passage in his life by writing about it. It is interesting to watch the emotional progression of the book. It begins by focusing on feelings and emotions. And the heavy weight of emotions in the center of the book demonstrates the writer’s pain. But as the journey progresses it is in the lessening of the emotions that clarity returns and with clarity, freedom. In the freer state he reenters life with more consciousness and purpose and less need to obsess on his loss and painful need. It is at this time he has one of the most significant occurrences of his life, and it is poignant that he encounters H.’s presence with an unemotional “intimacy,” one he describes as pure intellect.

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Lewis scholars are commonly in agreement that Lewis’s prose style in A Grief Observed surpasses much of his other work. Don King suggests that the book could be read as free verse, noting that it was Lewis’s long standing desire to craft poetry and he gave his careful attention to his prose throughout his writing life.45 Ironically, it is in the midst of his soul-consuming crisis that he loses himself so completely in his subject that his poetic impulses are the least stifled and most flowing. This position stands in sharp contrast to Schakel’s perspective of a deliberateness and intentionality shaping this work. King’s observations seem thus much more reasonable, and given the state of Lewis’s grief at the time of writing, this unstructured format would allow his most lucid, most authentic prose to come forth. King’s work, C. S. Lewis: Poet offers an excellent chapter on Lewis’s poetic prose, including insightful analysis of the prose style found in A Grief Observed.46 There is a straight-forwardness in asking the questions that only someone who has reached that level of anger and disappointment would dare utter. The line of what is permissible to say about faith, God, sex, marriage, death, or pain has disappeared. There is no reason to hold back those thoughts or questions any longer. There is no desire to spare others from his blunt, even harsh, speculations. And for this reason the book belongs among the literature of faith. The powerful truth Lewis realizes is that our poor faith is nothing, and it is truly in God’s goodness that this is exposed: He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are “offended” by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.47

Facing his worst thoughts about God, life, and death, Lewis explores the sort of ideas that often fester in seasons of darkness and trouble. A Grief Observed has a definite place in the literature of grief in or out of Christian contexts. Grief is understood as a process that Lewis recognizes that he cannot control and must accept. By the end of the book Lewis has learned much about the process of letting go of false hope, of Joy, of the life they shared, and in effect, letting go of a significant part of his own identity—his own sense of self. He also comes to see that bereavement is a phase of marriage and he resolves to endure it well. In part, for the honor he wants to give to his marriage: What we want is to live our marriages well and faithfully through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase. . . . For me the program is plain. I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her, the nearer I seem to her.48

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He understands this in his intellect, while emotionally he crumbles. But such is the process. It is rocky and unpredictable. A Grief Observed makes for uncomfortable reading but I suggest it is worth the risk of discomfort confronting another’s sad turmoil. When someone we know is in the midst of the crushing darkness of grief, we can employ this work and recognize the common plight, the undeniable pain, and the type of questions that a grieving mind is prone to ask. The reader is introduced to the volatile and debilitating nature of grief. Over time Lewis gains more strength and regains his composure, though he knows he still is very raw and fragile. As he moves to a restored equilibrium, he comes to understand that many of his troubling thoughts will never be answered and he can accept that. There is, finally, a power to A Grief Observed that is derived from facing the unanswerable questions and gaining new insight into who we are and who God is. Lewis does not romanticize or overly spiritualize the process of grieving, he rejects all attempts to simplify. His faithfulness in this regard empowers any comment or observation he makes on spiritual matters. For these reasons, A Grief Observed succeeds where few other books on the topic have, and remains a classic work on the human experience of grief, particularly as it interacts with doubt and faith. NOTES 1. Lyle W. Dorsett, And God Came In (Grand Rapids, MI: Crossway Books, 1991), 39–40. This work is now published as A Love Observed. 2. Ibid., 58–61. 3. Brian Sibley, C.S. Lewis through the Shadowlands (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1985), 101–102. 4. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1988), 350–352. 5. Ibid., 351. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Michael White, C. S. Lewis: A Life (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 181. 9. Ibid., 182–83. 10. Ibid., 184. 11. Sayer, Jack, 356. 12. Ibid., 363–364. 13. Ibid., 367. 14. Ibid., 367–68. 15. C. S. Lewis [N. W. Clerk, pseudo.], A Grief Observed (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 3. 16. Ibid., 4

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17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Ibid., 13. 21. Ibid., 25. 22. Ibid., 29. 23. Ibid., 43. 24. Ibid., 48. 25. Ibid., 49. 26. Ibid., 53. 27. Ibid., 56. 28. Ibid., 58–59. 29. Ibid., 66. 30. Ibid., 71. 31. Ibid., 72. 32. Ibid., 76. 33. Ibid., 81. 34. Ibid., 86. 35. Sayer, Jack, 394. 36. Douglas H. Gresham, Lenten Lands (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 132–133. 37. White, C. S. Lewis: A Life, 221. 38. Kathryn Lindskoog, Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 157. 39. Ibid., 157–158. 40. Peter J. Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 163–182. 41. Ibid., 166. 42. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 3. 43. Ibid., 2. 44. Chad Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 239–241. 45. Don King, C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 237–238. 46. Ibid., 237–244. 47. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 76–77. 48. Ibid., 46.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings. New York: Ballantine, 1978. Como, James T. C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

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Dorsett, Lyle W. And God Came In. Grand Rapids, MI: Crossway Books, 1991. (This book has been reprinted by the same publisher as A Love Observed.) Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974. Gresham, Douglas H. Lenten Lands. New York: Macmillan, 1988. Kilby, Clyde S. and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. King, Don. C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001. Lewis, C. S. [N. W. Clerk, pseudo.]. A Grief Observed. London: Faber & Faber, 1961. Lindskoog, Kathryn. Sleuthing C. S. Lewis. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1988. Schakel, Peter J. Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1984. Sibley, Brian. C.S. Lewis through the Shadowlands. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1985. Vanauken, Sheldon. A Severe Mercy. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1977. Walker, Andrew and James Patrick, eds. A Christian for All Christians: Essays in Honor of C. S. Lewis. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992. Walsh, Chad. The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. White, Michael. C. S. Lewis: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.

Index

The Abolition of Man (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 12; Barfield regarding, 236–37; publishing of, 179–80 Adolescence/boyhood: The Faerie Queene and, 46–47; Hooper and, 50; in Jack: A Life of Lewis, 49; Lewis, Warren Hamilton, and, 48; vacations at Little Lea during, 67–69. See also Malvern College; Watford boarding school; Wynyard School Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love (Nygren), 164 Agape Fund, 235–36 Allegory, 268–69 The Allegory of Love (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 264; Barfield and, 236; begins work on, 155 Americans, 13 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 184 Anstey, F., 56–57 Anthroposophy: background on, 145 n.52, 256; Barfield and, 114, 137, 224–26, 228–29, 234–35; God/man relationship and, 235; Harwood and, 224, 225, 234–35; Lewis’s, C. S., distaste for, 224–25, 228–29, 234–35 Anya (Gresham, Joy Davidman), 279, 296

“Apostate” (Gresham, Joy Davidman), 277–78 Arnold, Reverend Thomas, 60–61 Arthurian Torso (Lewis, C. S.), 181 Askins, Dr. John, 141–42 Atheism: Gresham, Joy Davidman, and, 276; Lewis, C. S., and, 92–93, 112–13, 116–18 Atonement, 160 Attenborough, Sir Richard, 8 Baker, Leo: conversion journey of Lewis, C. S., and, 139; correspondence with, 164–65; Lewis, C. S./Barfield introduction by, 220 Barfield, Matilda (Maud), 229–30, 234 Barfield, Owen, 155, 181; The Abolition of Man regarding, 236–37; academic disappointments and, 238; Agape Fund and, 235–36; Anthroposophy and, 114, 137, 224–26, 228–29, 234–35; Baker and, 220; childhood of Lewis, C. S., and, 219; Christianity and, 233–35; collaborations with Lewis, C. S., 237–38; conversion journey of Lewis, C. S., and, 5, 113–14, 229, 232–33; dance and, 221; death of Lewis, C. S., and,

316

Barfield, Owen (cont.) 239–40; debates with, 222, 234–35; documentary film on, 227; English People by, 231; essay “Death” by, 231–32; evolution of consciousness and, 225–28; fellow undergraduates and, 220–21; friendship of Lewis, C. S., with, 220–22, 236–37, 239–40; God/man relationship and, 235; Harwood’s friendship with, 219–20, 224; History in English Words and, 226; idealist perspective and, 229; imaginative experience and, 222–23; imaginative writings and, 237; joy/sehnsucht and, 230–31; law career and, 232; marriage of, 229; poetry and, 221–22, 226–27, 237; Saving the Appearances and, 238–39; Steiner school and, 232; three C. S. Lewises and, 2; trust set up by, 176; walking tours with, 164, 230 BBC. See Radio, BBC Belfast, 23–24 Bereavement. See A Grief Observed Bible, 105–6 Bide, Father Peter, 202–3, 287 Bodleian Library, 154–55 Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis (Lewis, C. S.), 37 Boyhood/adolescence: The Faerie Queene and, 46–47; Hooper and, 50; in Jack: A Life of Lewis, 49; Lewis, Warren Hamilton, and, 48; vacations at Little Lea during, 67–69. See also Malvern College; Watford boarding school; Wynyard School Brother. See Lewis, Warren Hamilton Buddhism, 139 Cambridge professorial years: books written/published during, 198, 200, 203, 206–12; daily schedule during, 200; final days/death ending, 213–14; grief experienced during,

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305–6; health during, 203, 209–12, 300; honors received during, 205; inaugural lecture during, 199; professorship beginning, 197–98; residences during, 199–200; resigns chair during, 212; Tolkien’s support regarding, 265 Campbell College, 107 Canon. See Lewis, C. S., canon Capron, Robert, 65–67 Catholic, 21–23, 269 Cherbourg preparatory school, 107–8 Chesterton, G. K., 5, 116, 152 Childhood: Barfield regarding, 219; books read/stories created in, 37, 254; conversion journey and, 106–7; dialectic of desire/sehnsucht during, 35–36; at Dundela Villas, 33; imagination during, 255; joy during, 254, 255; Lewis, Warren Hamilton, 33–34, 36–38; in Little Lea, 36–38; mother’s death during, 2–3, 5, 38, 46, 255; nicknames in, 34; northernness/mythology and, 109, 254–55; overview of, 17; peace of, 253; relationship with brother during, 34; sparse information about, 24–25; symbols of, 18–19 Christianity: Barfield and, 233–35; BBC talks on, 177–78; charity of Lewis, C. S., and, 235–36; conversion to, 2, 5, 118, 120, 159–60; doctrine regarding, 175–76; education system, British, and, 58–60; God/man relationship and, 235; Gresham, Joy Davidman, and, 279, 282–83; Gresham, William Lindsay, and, 282, 283; Harwood and, 234; “interplanetary romances” and, 6; issues regarding, 160–61, 163; Lewis, C. S., books on, 2–4; Lewis, C. S./Tolkien and, 268–69; mere, 10; Mere Christianity and, 4, 6–7, 176–78; myth and, 259–60; Nygren and, 164; RAF lectures on,

Index

178; sermons delivered on, 174, 178–79; Socratic Club regarding, 179 Christina dream, 222–23 Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis, C. S.), 7, 187; as allegorical, 268; perpetual cosmic war in, 96; popularity of, 4; “supposals” and, 268; Tolkien’s opinion of, 267–68 Churchill, Winston, 189 Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life (Griffin), 306 Coghill, Nevill, 142; conversion journey of Lewis, C. S., and, 119, 141; Exeter appointment of, 150 Consciousness, 225–28 Convalescence, 92–94, 134 Conversion journey: atheism during, 112–13, 116–18; Baker and, 139; Barfield’s influence on, 5, 113–14, 229, 232–33; books/authors influencing, 114–16, 141, 157; childhood influences on, 106–7; to Christianity, 2, 5, 118, 120, 159–60; Coghill and, 119, 141; “Death” and, 231–32; diary regarding, 154; Dymer and, 116–17; Dyson’s influence on, 119–20, 159; Everlasting Man and, 152; Greeves and, 109–10, 157–58; of Gresham, Joy Davidman, 281–83; joy and, 103–5; Kirkpatrick’s influence on, 110–11, 140; Lewis’s, Albert J., death and, 118; MacDonald’s influence on, 114–15; overview of, 106; Oxford and, 112–13, 138–39, 152–54, 156–60; philosophical muddle during, 153; schooling influences on, 107–9; Spirits in Bondage and, 112–13; as spiritual homecoming, 232–33; Surprised by Joy and, 5, 106, 109, 117–18, 156, 160; theism and, 116–18, 138, 154, 156, 229; Tolkien’s influence on, 5, 119–20, 159; war and, 112; what it wasn’t,

r 317

105–6; Wynyard School and, 107 Cording, Ruth, 26, 50 Cowie, Miss G. E., 107–8, 121 n.15 Craig, James, 54–55 C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Green & Hooper): boyhood/adolescent years in, 48; “Death” and, 231–32 C. S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life (Cording), 50 C. S. Lewis and The Catholic Church (Pearce), 269 C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (Walsh), 282 C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (King), 50, 310 C. S. Lewis through the Shadowlands (Sibley), 8 Death: of Gresham, Joy Davidman, 208, 289; influence of mother’s, 2, 38, 46, 255; of Kirkpatrick, 139–40; of Lewis, Albert J., 118, 156–57; of Lewis, C. S., 213–14, 239–40, 269–70; of Lewis, Flora Augusta (Hamilton), 38; of Moore, Mrs. Janie, 187; of Williams, 181 “Death” (Barfield), 231–32 Degree: Greats, 141, 146 n.80; honorary, 182; Literature, 142–43, 146 n.80 Descent into Hell (Williams), 166 Dialectic of desire, 35–36 Diary, 154. See also A Grief Observed The Discarded Image (Lewis, C. S.), 213, 214 Doctrine: of atonement, 160; Christian, 175–76; of redemption, 159 Downing, David, 51 Dualism, 163 Duriez, Colin, 269 Dymer (Lewis, C. S.), 2, 90; begun at Oxford, 140; Christina dream and, 223; conversion journey and, 116–17; published, 153

318

Dyson, H. V. D. “Hugo,” 82, 265; conversion journey of Lewis, C. S., and, 119–20, 159; developing friendship with, 158 “The Easley Fragment” (Lewis, C. S.), 64 Education, pre-Oxford: faith during, 66–67; Lewis–Greeves letters and, 49; research on, 46–51; steamship travel during, 63–65; Surprised by Joy and, 45–46, 48; troubles in, 55–56, 61–63; Walsh on, 47; Watford boarding school and, 47; Wynyard School and, 55–56, 65–67 Education system, British: Arnold and, 60–61; code of behavior/Christianity and, 58–60; fagging system in, 61; Lewis’s, C. S., troubles in, 55–56, 61–63; nature of, 56–58; public, 57–60 Edwards, Maurice, 178 Eliot, T. S., 165, 181 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Lewis, C. S.), 3; publishing of, 198–99; Trinity College lectures and, 180 English People (Barfield), 162, 165, 231 Enlightenment, 11–12 Europe, Western, 19–21, 51–52 The Everlasting Man (Chesterton), 116, 152 Evil: God and, 163; nature of, 95 Evolution of consciousness, 225–28 Examined life, 7, 14 An Experiment in Criticism (Lewis, C. S.), 12, 209 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 3, 46–47 Fagging system, 61 Faith: A Grief Observed and, 304, 310; Lewis’s, C. S., 66–67 Father. See Lewis, Albert J. “The Form of Hamlet” (Barfield), 237

r Index

The Four Loves (Lewis, C. S.), 4; contents of, 206; eternity and, 13; friendship and, 239, 266–67; Gresham, Joy Davidman, and, 203, 290 Fox, Adam, 174 France, 88–92 Friendships, 296; Barfield, 220–22, 236–37, 239–40; Dyson, 158; The Four Loves and, 266–67; Tolkien, 249, 252–53, 257–58, 265–67 Front lines, 88–89 Gaelic League, 23–24 Gastons, 81–82 German offensive, 90 Gilmore, Charles, 178 God: Anthroposophy and, 235; evil and, 163; A Grief Observed and, 301–5; joy and, 103–5 Gordon, George, 141 The Gospel According to Tolkien (Wood), 268–69 The Great Divorce (Lewis, C. S.), 180 Great War. See War, Great Green, Roger Lancelyn, 48, 174, 231–32, 289, 307 Greeves, Arthur: background regarding, 97 n.7; conversion journey regarding, 109–10, 157, 158; doctrine of atonement and, 160; God/evil and, 163; Lewis’s, C. S., letters to, 49, 157; The Pilgrim’s Regress concerning, 162 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 24 Gresham, Doug (step son), 305–6 Gresham, Joy Davidman (wife), 7–8; Anya and, 279, 296; atheism and, 276; background of, 275–76, 296–97; cancer and, 202–3, 206–7, 276–77, 287–88, 300; Christianity and, 279, 282–83; civil ceremony and, 286–87; Communism of, 280;

Index

controversy surrounding, 175; conversion of, 281–83; death of, 208, 289; divorce regarding, 190, 198, 285; early ill health and, 276–77; education of, 277, 278; finances managed by, 204; Greece trip and, 207, 289; Gresham, William Lindsay, and, 280–85; as high school teacher, 278; holy matrimony and, 287; influence of, 290, 298; intellectual prowess of, 275–76, 286; The Kilns restoration by, 204; Letter to a Comrade and, 279, 296; Lewis’s, C. S., friends’ views of, 286; London trip/move and, 284–85, 297–98; marriage to Lewis, C. S., of, 201–3, 286–87; meets Lewis, C. S., 284; political beliefs of, 278–80; recovery of, 288; relationship with Lewis, C. S., of, 9, 186, 188–89, 198, 200–205, 286, 288–90, 306; Shadowlands depiction of, 9; Walsh and, 282–83; writes to Lewis, C. S., 283 Gresham, William Lindsay: background on, 280–81, 296–97; Christianity and, 282, 283; infidelity of, 283–85; spiritual paths and, 197 A Grief Observed (Lewis, C. S.), 4, 9, 208–9; as autobiographical v. fictional, 306–9; bereavement/faith and, 304, 310; first section of, 301–3; God, subject of, in, 301–5; Gresham, Joy Davidman, and, 290; grief process within, 300–301; Hooper and, 306–7; as intimate, 309–11; notebooks concerning, 308–9; poetic prose and, 310; reflections within, 302–5; Schakel regarding, 307–8; Walsh on, 309 Griffin, William, 306 Griffiths, Alan, 157, 165–66 Griffiths, Dom Bede: Lewis’s, C. S., war perspective and, 167; marriage of Lewis, C. S., and, 288

r 319

Hamilton-Jenkin, Alfred Kenneth, 142 Hamilton, Mary Warren (maternal grandmother), 21, 28–29 Hamilton, Reverend Thomas Robert (maternal grandfather), 29–31 Harwood, Alfred Cecil: Anthroposophy and, 224, 225, 234–35; Barfield’s friendship with, 219–20, 224; Christianity and, 234; death of Lewis, C. S., and, 239; qualities assigned to, 223–24; walking tours with, 230 Hayes, Carlton, 20 Herbert, George, 116 History in English Words (Barfield), 226 History of the Somerset Light Infantry (Wyrall), 91 Hitler, 163 The Hobbit (Tolkien): language in, 264; Lewis, C. S., on, 261; popularity of, 250 Honors: at Cambridge, 205; at Oxford, 199; from University of St. Andrews, 182 Hooper, Walter, 26, 48; correspondence and, 212; A Grief Observed and, 306–7; Lewis’s, C. S., boyhood and, 50; Tolkien and, 267 The Horse and His Boy (Lewis, C. S.), 187, 198 Hughes, Thomas, 59–60 Imaginative fiction, of Lewis, C. S., 3 Inklings, 8, 199–200, 211; dwindling of, 265; formation of, 261–62; 1939 meeting of, 173–74; Out of the Silent Planet and, 262–63; Tolkien and, 261–62, 265; undergraduate circle and, 220–21; walking tours of, 182, 230; Williams’s death and, 181; Wolfe on, 11 The Inklings (Carpenter), 230

320

“The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy” (Barfield), 237 Irishmen war exemptions, 82 Irish Question: Gaelic League and, 23; home rule and, 22–23, 54, 55; politics surrounding, 53–55; Yeats’ history bells and, 21–23 Jack: A Life of Lewis (Sayer): boyhood/adolescent years and, 49; as definitive, 25–26; Gresham, Joy Davidman, in, 297–99; A Grief Observed and, 306 Joy: Barfield regarding, 230–31; childhood, 254, 255; desire for God as, 103–5; experience of, 138, 157. See also Surprised by Joy J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Shippey), 251 Keble College, 131–32 The Kilns: Lewis, Warren Hamilton, and, 158–59, 161–62; Oxford industrialization and, 164; purchase of, 158–59; restoration of, 204 King, Don, 50, 51, 310 “The King of Drum” (Lewis, C. S.), 153 Kirkpatrick, W. T., 45, 47, 48, 80; conversion journey of Lewis, C. S., and, 110–11, 140; death of, 139–40; Great War and, 81; influence on Lewis, C. S., of, 97 n.4; languages studied/books read under, 129; Lewis’s, C. S., responsions and, 83, 84 Kolb´ıtars club, 152 Kreeft, Peter, 306 Language, 129, 253, 256–57, 264 The Last Battle (Lewis, C. S.): Divine Grace regarding, 163; Gresham, Joy Davidman, and, 290 Latin correspondences, 183 “Learning in War Time” (Lewis, C. S.), 13–14

r Index

Lecture(s): Oxford, 150, 167; RAF, 178; Riddell Memorial, 179; Trinity College, 180; Williams, 175 Letters to Malcolm (Lewis, C. S.), 4, 9, 175, 211–12, 214 Letter to a Comrade (Gresham, Joy Davidman), 279, 296 Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life (Cording), 26 Lewis: A Companion & Guide (Hooper), 26 Lewis, Albert J. (father), 18, 24, 26–28; background/character of, 31–32; death of, 118, 156–57; ill health of, 154; Irish home rule and, 54, 55; Lewis’s, C. S., fallout with, 136–37; public schools regarding, 58; relationship with sons of, 67–69, 87–88, 93, 136–37; relationship with wife of, 32; St. Mark’s Church and, 121 n.13; as Unionist speaker, 22; verbal bullying by, 68–69; Wynyard School and, 56 Lewis, C. S. See specific topics Lewis, C. S., canon: popularity/success of, 4–5; survey of, 2–4 Lewis family heritage: Lewis Papers/biographies on, 25–26; Lewis, Warren Hamilton, and, 25, 30; maternal grandparents in, 28–31; paternal grandparents in, 26–28; sparse information about, 24–25; in Surprised by Joy, 25 Lewis, Flora Augusta (Hamilton) (mother), 18, 31; death of/regarding, 2–3, 5, 38, 46, 255; relationship with husband of, 32; Wynyard School and, 56 Lewis, Martha Gee (paternal grandmother), 26–27 Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930 (Lewis, Warren Hamilton), 25; boyhood/adolescent years in, 48; “The Easley Fragment”

Index

in, 64; where to read unpublished, 49 Lewis, Richard (paternal grandfather), 26–28 Lewis, Warren Hamilton (brother), 18; alcoholism of, 183, 186; boyhood and, 48; childhood of, 33–34, 36–38; China return of, 158; correspondence and, 177, 191 n.27; death of Lewis, C. S., and, 213–14; family heritage and, 25, 30; father’s relationship with, 67–69; Great War and, 80–81, 91–92, 94; ill health of Lewis, C. S., and, 212, 213; The Kilns and, 158–59, 161–62; on Lewis, C. S., at Malvern College, 62; military service of, 52, 73, 76–77; play at Little Lea of, 36, 37; toy garden/forest and, 35; Wynyard School and, 55–56 Lindsay, David, 6, 164 Lindskoog, Kay, 306–7 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 187; as allegorical, 268; children evacuation and, 73; movie criticisms, 14 n.7; popularity of, 4, 250; writing of, 185 Literae Humaniores, 135, 140–41 Literary history by Lewis, C. S., 2, 3 The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (Walsh), 306 Little Lea, 18; after Great War at, 94; books read/stories created at, 37; childhood in, 36–38; Moore, Mrs. Janie, at, 157; school boy vacations in, 67–69; selling of, 158 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien): Inklings and, 261; language in, 264; Lewis’s, C. S., encouragement of, 251–52, 268; popularity of, 250; straight/twisted path and, 263–64 The Lost Road (Tolkien), 263, 264

r 321

MacDonald, George: conversion journey of Lewis, C. S., and, 114–15; selected readings from, 181 Magdalen College, 150–51 The Magician’s Nephew (Lewis, C. S.), 66, 186, 187 Malvern College, 61–63 Mappa Mundi, 95–96 Marriage, 201–3, 267, 286–88 Martlets literary club, 135 Matthews, Walter Robert, 178 “Meditation in a Toolshed” (Lewis, C. S.), 12 Mere Christianity, 10 Mere Christianity (Lewis, C. S.), 4, 176; BBC talks and, 177–78; success of, 6–7 Michaelmas Club, 155 Military service: contracts trench fever during, 89; convalescence during, 92–94, 134; in France, 88–92; front lines and, 88–89; German offensive during, 90; Irishmen exemptions regarding, 82; joins OTC for, 85, 130; of Lewis, Warren Hamilton, 52, 73, 76–77; Local Defense Volunteers and, 177; preparations for, 82–84; Somerset regiment and, 87–88, 133–34; wounded during, 90–91, 134 Milton, John, 3 Miracles (Lewis, C. S.), 12; Anscombe’s criticism of, 184; Sayers and, 180 Moore, Edward “Paddy”: background/family of, 86, 131–32; killing of, 86, 99 n.29 Moore, Mrs. Janie, 86–87, 89, 93, 133; death of, 187; health of, 182–83; home purchase by, 158–59; Lewis’s, C. S., support of, 136; at Little Lea, 157; nursing home and, 186–87; relationship with Lewis, C. S., of, 144 n.27; vacation/moving in with, 138, 140

322

More, Paul Elmer, 165 Mother. See Lewis, Flora Augusta (Hamilton) Movies: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 14 n.7; Shadowlands, 7–9, 174 “Myth Become Fact” (Lewis, C. S.), 260 Mythology: Christianity and, 259–60; historical facts and, 259; Lewis, C. S./ Tolkien and, 251, 257–60; qualities of, 258; stories involving, 261–65; Surprised by Joy and, 109, 254–55 Mythopoeia, 258–59 “Mythopoeia” (Tolkien), 259 Newbolt, Henry, 59 Nicknames, 34 Northernness, 258; childhood and, 109, 254–55; Surprised by Joy and, 109; Tolkien and, 257 Novelist, Lewis, C. S., as, 2 Nygren, Anders, 164 On Fairy Stories (Tolkien), 257–58 Orpheus (Barfield), 237 OTC. See University Officers’ Training Corp Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis, C. S.), 3; Inklings and, 262–63; origin of, 262; writing/publishing of, 166 Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, 227 Oxford early tutorial years: Bodleian Library and, 154–55; books written/published during, 153, 155, 161–62, 166–67, 180, 185; brother’s return during, 158; conversion journey during, 152–54, 156–60; doctrine of redemption and, 159; English examinations during, 162; father’s death during, 156–57; female students and, 153–54; habitation during, 151; home purchase during, 158–59; lectures and, 150, 167;

r Index

Magdalen appointment during, 150–51; Michaelmas Club started during, 155; Oxford History of English Literature and, 165, 167, 188–89; teaching and, 163–64; temporary placement during, 149–50; Tolkien met during, 152–53, 252; typical day during, 152 Oxford History of English Literature, 165, 167, 188–89 Oxford later tutorial years: Anscombe’s criticism during, 184; BBC talks during, 177–78; books written/ published during, 174–76, 179–80; Christian doctrine discussed during, 175–76; colleagues’ criticism during, 264–65; disenchantment during, 197; first confession during, 177; health during, 185–86; honorary fellowship during, 199; Inklings meeting during, 173–74; lecturing style during, 174; Professor of Poetry election during, 187–88; RAF lectures during, 178; The Screwtape Letters and, 176; sermons delivered during, 174, 178–79; Socratic Club formed during, 179; Time article and, 183–84; Tolkien’s support during, 265; train ticket incident during, 175; Williams’s death during, 181 Oxford student years: books/poems begun during, 140; books published during, 136; Classical Honour Moderations exams and, 137–38; conversion journey during, 112–13, 138–39; Encaenia and, 145 n.62; English literature study during, 140–41; first Trinity term and, 130–31; Greats degree earned during, 141, 146 n.80; idyllic period during, 85–86; joins OTC during, 85, 130; at Keble College, 131–32; Literae Humaniores and, 135, 140–41;

Index

Literature degree earned during, 142–43, 146 n.80; Martlets literary club and, 135; poverty during, 136, 142; responsions and, 83–84, 112, 128–30, 132; scholarship exam and, 83, 111, 127–28; terms and, 143 n.5; Triple First during, 143, 143 n.21; typical day during, 135 Pearce, Joseph, 269 Penelope, Sister, 167–68; Lewis’s, C. S., first confession and, 177; The Screwtape Letters and, 176 Perelandra (Lewis, C. S.), 3; as allegorical, 268; The Lost Road and, 263; writing/publishing of, 179 The Personal Heresy (Lewis, C. S., & Tillyard), 3, 167 Phantastes (MacDonald), 114–15 The Pilgrim’s Regress (Lewis, C. S.), 2–3, 6; English People compared with, 162, 165, 231; perpetual cosmic war in, 95–96; publishing of, 162, 165; Sheed and Ward concerning, 165; writing of, 161 Pitter, Ruth, 182 “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction” (Barfield), 237 Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Barfield), 238; consciousness and, 226–27; Lewis, C. S., and, 228, 236 Poetry: Barfield and, 221–22, 226–27, 237; A Grief Observed and, 310; Lewis’s, C. S., 2, 50; Pitter and, 182; Professor of Poetry election and, 187–88 Potter, Beatrix, 35–36, 254 Prayer, 161, 210–12 A Preface to Paradise Lost (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 12–13 Prince Caspian (Lewis, C. S.), 186–87 The Problem of Pain (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 6, 174; on his boyhood, 46; as theoretical, 309

r 323

Professor of Poetry election, 187–88 Protestants, 21–23 Proto-postmodernist beliefs, 12–13 Public education, 57–60 “The Quest of Bleheris” (Lewis, C. S.), 51 Radio, BBC: broadcasts, 6–7, 177–78, 210, 217 n.84; essays, 4, 6 RAF. See Royal Air Force Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis (Schakel), 307–8 Redemption, 159 Reflections on the Psalms (Lewis, C. S.), 4, 203, 290 Rehabilitations and Other Essays (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 167 Responsions, 83–84, 112, 128–30, 132 “Reveal the Titan” (Gresham, Joy Davidman), 278 Riddell Memorial Lectures, 179 “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” (Lewis, C. S.), 6 The Road to Middle Earth (Shippey), 264 Robbins, Cherry, 85–86 Royal Air Force (RAF) lectures, 178 Sacraments, 160–61 Salvation, 163 “Satan Speaks” (Lewis, C. S.), 92–93 Saving the Appearances (Barfield), 238–39 Sayer, George, 306; death of Lewis, C. S., and, 239; on Gresham, Joy Davidman, 297–99; joy and, 255; Lewis, C. S., at Malvern and, 62; on Lewis, C. S./Tolkien, 266 Sayers, Dorothy, 180–81, 186 Schakel, Peter, 307–8 Scholar, Lewis, C. S., as, 2 Scholarship exam, 83, 111, 127–28 Scientism, 12–13

324

The Screwtape Letters (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 7; Inklings and, 261; writing/ publishing of, 176 Sehnsucht, 35–36, 103, 138, 230–31. See also Joy Sermons, 174, 178–79 Shadowlands (documentary film), 7–9, 174; Gresham, Joy Davidman, depiction in, 9; Lewis’s, C. S., depiction in, 8–9 The Shadowlands (Sibley), 306 The Shadowlands of C. S. Lewis (Kreeft), 306 Shippey, T. A., 96–97, 251, 264 Sibley, Brian, 8, 306 The Silmarillion (Tolkien), 261 The Silver Chair (Lewis, C. S.), 187 The Silver Trumpet (Barfield), 223 Skeptics, 11–12 Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (Lindskoog), 306–7 Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments (Gresham, Joy Davidman), 284, 290 Social constructionism, 12 Socratic Club, 179 Spenser, Edmund, 3 Spirits in Bondage (Lewis, C. S.), 2, 92–93, 94; conversion journey regarding, 112–13; publishing of, 136 Steamship travel, 63–65 Steiner, Rudolf, 145 n.52, 224–25, 232, 234 St. Mark’s Dundela Church, 18–19, 106; Lewis, Albert J., and, 121 n.13, 156; Lewis family gifts to, 19 Studies in Words (Lewis, C. S.), 207 Surprised by Joy (Lewis, C. S.), 4, 9; Christina dream and, 222–23; comments on father in, 69; conversion journey and, 5, 106, 109, 117–18, 156, 160; education, pre-Oxford, in, 45–46, 48;

r Index

Gresham’s, Joy Davidman, influence on, 290; Lewis family heritage in, 25; northernness/mythology and, 109, 254–55; Poetic Diction and, 228; Steamship travel in, 63–64 Synge, John, 24 The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (Potter), 35–36, 254 That Hideous Strength (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 12, 142; The Lost Road and, 263; Tolkien’s opinion regarding, 266; Williams and, 180, 266 Theism, 116–18, 138, 154, 156, 229 Theologian, Lewis, C. S., as, 2 They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), 49, 109 This Ever Diverse Pair (Barfield), 237 Three C. S. Lewises, 2 Till We Have Faces (Lewis, C. S.), 3, 13, 140, 200, 290 Tillyard, E. M. W., 167 Time magazine article, 183–84 Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (Duriez), 269 Tolkien, J. R. R., 4–5, 82, 181, 186, 197–98; background of, 253; Christianity and, 268–69; Chronicles of Narnia and, 267–68; education of, 257; fantasy over allegory and, 268–69; in Great War, 256; That Hideous Strength and, 266; The Hobbit and, 250, 261, 264; Hooper and, 267; Inklings and, 261–62, 265; Kolb´ıtars club and, 152; language and, 253, 256–57, 264; Lewis, C. S., conversion journey of, and, 5, 119–20, 159; Lewis’s, C. S., death and, 269–70; Lewis, C. S., and friendship with, 249, 252–53, 257–58, 265–67; Lewis’s, C. S., marriage and, 267; Lewis, C. S., meeting, 152–53, 252; Lord of the

Index

Rings and, 250, 251–52, 261, 263–64, 268; mother of, 256; mythology and, 251, 257–60; northernness and, 257; Out of the Silent Planet and, 262–63; Oxford academics and, 264–65; as Papist/philologist, 260; space travel/time travel stories and, 262–63; straight/twisted path and, 263–64; success of, 250, 251; Williams and, 265–67 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes), 59–60 Trench fever, 89 Triple First, 143, 143 n.21 Ulster countryside, 19 University Officers’ Training Corp (OTC): colleagues in, 86; joins, 85, 130 University of St. Andrews, 182 Vice Versa (Anstey), 56–57 “Vitai Lampada” (Newbolt), 59 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Lewis, C. S.), 187 Voyage to Arcturus (Lindsay), 6, 164 Walking tour(s): Cotswolds, 155; Derbyshire, 164; Inklings, 182, 230; with Lewis, Warren Hamilton, 159; 1927, 153; South Downs Way, 161 Walsh, Chad, 306; Gresham, Joy Davidman, and, 282–83; on A Grief Observed, 309; pre-Oxford education and, 47 War, Great (First World): background of, 79–80; contracts trench fever during, 89; convalescence during, 92–94, 134; end of, 94; in France during, 88–92; front lines in, 88–89; at Gastons during, 81–82; German offensive in, 90; Irishmen exemptions

r 325

and, 82; Lewis’s, C. S., awareness of, 52–53, 81; Lewis, Warren Hamilton, and, 80–81, 91–92, 94; at Little Lea after, 94; Tolkien and, 256; wounded during, 90–91, 134 War, perpetual cosmic: in Chronicles of Narnia, 96; in Pilgrim’s Regress, 95–96; Shippey concerning, 96–97; war memories and, 94–95, 99 n.44 Warren, Sir Thomas Herbert, 150–51 War, Second World: BBC talks during, 177–78; commencement of, 73; RAF lectures during, 178 Watford boarding school, 47 Weeping Bay (Gresham, Joy Davidman), 284 The Weight of Glory (Lewis, C. S.), 178 Welch, James, 6, 177–78 Weldon, T. D. “Harry,” 118, 123 n.49 White, Father Victor, 297 “Why I am no a Pacifist” (Lewis, C. S.), 165, 167 Williams, Charles, 166; death of, 181; Divinity School lecture by, 175; That Hideous Strength and, 180; Inklings formation and, 261–62, 265; moves to Oxford, 173; Tolkien and, 265–67 Wolfe, Gregory, 11 Wood, Ralph, 268–69 Worlds Apart (Barfield), 239 The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (Lewis, C. S.), 206 Wounding, 90–91, 134 Wynyard School: as brutal, 55–56, 65–67; conversion journey and, 107; Lewis’s, C. S., time at, 65–67; Lewis family and, 55–56 Wyrall, Everard, 91 Yeats, William Butler: conversion journey of Lewis, C. S., and, 139; Gaelic League and, 24; Irish history bells of, 21–24

About the Editor and Contributors

THE EDITOR BRUCE L. EDWARDS is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Distance Education and International Programs at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where has he been a faculty member and administrator since 1981. He has published several books on Lewis, most recently, Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual World of Narnia (Tyndale, 2005) and Further Up and Further in: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Broadman and Holman, 2005). These are volumes in addition to two scholarly works, A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy and The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. He has for many years maintained a popular web site on the life and works of C. S. Lewis (http://www.pseudobook.com/cslewis). During his academic career he has served as Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya (1999–2000), a Bradley Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC (1989–1990), and as the S. W. Brooks Memorial Professor of Literature at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1988); and a Fulbright-Hays Grant Recipient to Tanzania (2005). Bruce and his wife, Joan, live in Bowling Green, Ohio. Edwards is General Editor of this four-volume reference set on C. S. Lewis. THE CONTRIBUTORS PERRY C. BRAMLETT is the founder of “C. S. Lewis for the Local Church— Interstate Ministries,” a nationwide teaching ministry to churches, colleges,

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and interested groups on the life, works, and influence of Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other Christian storytellers. He is the author of C. S. Lewis: Life at the Center, Touring C. S. Lewis’ Ireland and England, and I Am in Fact a Hobbit: An Introduction to the Life and Work of J. R. R. Tolkien. He was a contributor to The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia and The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Science, Technology and Ethics. He has written articles, reviews, and sermons on Lewis for Preaching, The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal, The Lewis Legacy, and The C. S. Lewis News (Ireland). He is currently writing a biography of William Lindsay Gresham and articles on Lewis, Tolkien, and spirituality for several magazines and journals. He lives with his wife in Louisville, Kentucky. SCOTT CALHOUN is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Language and Literature at Cedarville University (Ohio), where he teaches writing and literature courses. He received his Ph.D. in English, with a specialization in Rhetoric and Writing, from Bowling Green State University. He lives in Xenia, Ohio, with his wife Garilyn and three daughters. ALICE H. COOK resides in Bowling Green, Ohio, with her husband. A long time Lewis enthusiast and a freelance writer, she contributed several entries to The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia (Zondervan, 1998), edited by Jeffrey Schultz and John West. LYLE W. DORSETT holds the Billy Graham Chair of Evangelism at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of numerous books, among them a biography of Joy Davidman (Mrs. C. S. Lewis) originally published as And God Came In and subsequently published as A Love Observed, as well as biographies on E. M. Bounds, Dwight L. Moody, and Billy Sunday. Keenly interested in the life and writings of C. S. Lewis, he has published a volume of Lewis’s Letters to Children and The Essential C. S. Lewis. His most recent book is Seeking the Secret Place: The Spiritual Formation of C. S. Lewis. COLIN DURIEZ is a full-time writer and editor educated at the University of Istanbul, Turkey, before further study in Northern Ireland at the University of Ulster, focusing on English and Philosophy. During his studies he began writing on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, publishing articles in England and the USA. After some years in editing and journalism in London, he moved to Leicester to work with Inter-Varsity Press as a commissioning editor. His books include The C. S. Lewis Chronicles (Bluebridge, 2005), A Field Guide to Narnia (InterVarsity, 2004), and Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship

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(Paulist Press, 2003). Duriez now lives in the English Lake District, and enjoys walking the fells and forests. JAKE HANSON is completing a Master of Divinity degree from Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his B.A. from Wheaton College after which he served as a research assistant for Dr. Christopher Mitchell and Mrs. Marjorie Mead at the Marion E. Wade Center, a museum which houses a major research collection of the books and papers of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. During this time, he also worked as an editorial assistant for the Wade Center’s annual journal, SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review. In addition, Jake has served for several years as Dr. Lyle W. Dorsett’s research assistant. He currently lives with his wife and child in Birmingham, Alabama. JANE HIPOLITO is Professor Emerita of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics at California State University, Fullerton. She has been a student of Owen Barfield’s writings for more than forty years. In 1980 she co-organized Owen Barfield’s visit to her campus. She is a frequent presenter at the Owen Barfield Session of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, author of numerous articles about Owen Barfield’s life and writings, co-founder of the Owen Barfield Society, and compiler of the “Complete Bibliography of Owen Barfield’s Published Writings” (2006), which is posted on the Owen Barfield Society’s Web site. RICHARD V. JAMES, a graduate of the University of Virginia and the Lexington Theological Seminary, is the pastor of the First Christian Church, Albany, Kentucky. He was a contributor of six articles to The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia (1998). He is also the author of two articles on C.S. Lewis presented and published at the C. S. Lewis and Friends Conferences at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana (Inklings Forever, Volumes II and III). Additional articles on C. S. Lewis have been published in The Lamp Post of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society (Spring 2000) and The Lewis Legacy (Winter/Spring 2003). For many years he has maintained the popular web resource, “The Cumberland River Lamp Post” at http://www.crlamppost.org/cslewis.htm and has presented several workshops and lectures on the life and work of C. S. Lewis. His website was highlighted in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society (January/February 2003). Richard and his wife, Mary, live in Albany, Kentucky, and have three grown children and three grandchildren.

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WILL VAUS holds the Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and has served as a pastor in California, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania. He is the president of Will Vaus Ministries, an international creative communications outreach. His publications include Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press, 2004). His ministry Web site URL is http:/www.willvaus.com.

C. S. LEWIS Life, Works, and Legacy

C. S. LEWIS Life, Works, and Legacy Volume 2: Fantasist, Mythmaker, and Poet

Edited by Bruce L. Edwards

PRAEGER PERSPECTIVES

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data C.S. Lewis : life, works, and legacy / edited by Bruce L. Edwards. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–99116–4 (set : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99117–2 (v. 1 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99118–0 (v. 2 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99119–9 (v. 3 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99120–2 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963—Criticism and interpretation. I. Edwards, Bruce L. PR6023.E926Z597 2007 823
.912–dc22 2006100486 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. C 2007 by Bruce L. Edwards Copyright 

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006100486 ISBN-10: 0–275–99116–4 (set) ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99116–6 0–275–99117–2 (Vol. 1) 978–0–275–99117–3 0–275–99118–0 (Vol. 2) 978–0–275–99118–0 0–275–99119–9 (Vol. 3) 978–0–275–99119–7 0–275–99120–2 (Vol. 4) 978–0–275–99120–3 First published in 2007 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This work is dedicated to my son, Justin Robert Edwards. Justin’s passion for life and for the life to come, his creativity and excellence in music and movie-making, his faith and resilience in the face of this world’s challenges, all inspire and amaze me, and bless everyone who knows him.

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface 1 “Patches of Godlight”: C. S. Lewis as Imaginative Writer Bruce L. Edwards

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2 Rehabilitating H. G. Wells: C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet David C. Downing

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3 Perelandra: A Tale of Paradise Retained David C. Downing

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4 That Hideous Strength: Spiritual Wickedness in High Places David C. Downing

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5 The World of Narnia: Medieval Magic and Morality Marvin D. Hinten

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6 Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, and Children of Aslan: An Environmentalist Perspective on The Chronicles of Narnia Margarita Carretero-Gonz´alez 7 Cartography and Fantasy: Hidden Treasures in the Maps of The Chronicles of Narnia Marta Garc´ıa de la Puerta 8 Till We Have Faces: A Study of the Soul and the Self Karen Rowe

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9 C. S. Lewis’s Short Fiction and Unpublished Works Katherine Harper

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10 The Screwtape Letters: Telling the Truth Upside Down Devin Brown

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11 Columns of Light: The Preconversion Narrative Poetry of C. S. Lewis Don W. King

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12 Early Lyric Poetry: Spirits in Bondage (1919) and “Joy” (1924) Don W. King

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13 Topical Poems: C. S. Lewis’s Postconversion Poetry Don W. King

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Index

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Acknowledgments

The genesis of this four-volume reference set is the kind invitation I received from Suzanne Staszak-Silva of Greenwood Publishing Group in late Spring, 2005, asking me to consider creating a reference work that would comprehensively deal with the life and work of C. S. Lewis. As it was the case that I was almost literally heading out the door to Tanzania on a Fulbright-Hays Grant, we did not get to consider the project in much detail until the end of the summer when, with the help of my literary agent, Matt Jacobson, we cheerfully exchanged ideas with Suzanne that have led to the expansive volumes you now hold in your hands. Suzanne and all the capable editors and reviewers at Greenwood have been terrific to work with, and I am once again grateful to Matt Jacobson of the Loyal Arts Literary Agency for his expertise and wise counsel. No project of this kind can, in fact, come to fruition without the help of many hands. I want to start with the contributors to this volume and the breadth and depth of C. S. Lewis scholarship they represent. Each of them, especially those contributing more than one essay, have cheerfully met my prescribed deadlines and offered both incisive and learned commentary on the topics for which they were chosen. I want to offer special thanks to busy and illustrious Lewisian colleagues and scholars, David Downing, Diana Glyer, David Bratman, Don King, Marvin Hinten, Lyle Dorsett, Colin Duriez, Victor Reppert, Devin Brown, Wayne Martindale, and Marjorie Lamp Mead, for making and taking the time to contribute their unique vantage points to this collection. Their knowledge of the Lewis canon continues to provide us with fresh insights into his legacy. The exciting thing about this particular collection, however, is not only the opportunity to recruit the already renowned scholars listed above, but also to attract new talent and younger scholars who

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bring their own generational insights into the issues and contexts many of us have been sifting for years. Walter Hooper has been unfailingly kind in his support of this project, helping me arrange access to some special collections at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Of course, Lewis scholars everywhere are in his debt for decades of indefatigable efforts to make the letters and papers of C. S. Lewis available to the public. Likewise, Christopher Mitchell, Director, and his staff, at the Marion C. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, continue to operate the most outstanding resource center on C. S. Lewis and the Inklings in North America. I treasure every moment I get to spend in the beautiful Wade Center’s hallowed library. Scott Calhoun, a longtime colleague and friend from Cedarville University, Ohio, answered my call for some late counsel on the disposition of the last several essays to be included for publication, and I will always be grateful for his graceful editorial touches. (The only thing missing in this collection is an essay that I am sure Scott wishes to compose on the influence of Lewis’s work on U2’s Bono. Maybe next time, Scott?) My colleagues at Bowling Green State University, especially my immediate supervisors, continue to be generous in support of my research and lecturing on C. S. Lewis. They have provided me with the writing time one needs to produce a set of volumes of this magnitude. Dr. William K. Balzer, Dean of Continuing and Extended Education and Associate Vice-President, along with Dr. Linda Dobb, Executive Vice-President, made possible a Spring 2006 trip to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England, and a presentation at the “C. S. Lewis, Renaissance Man” Conference at Cambridge University that significantly affected the scope and accuracy of this work. My own staff headed by Ms. Connie Molnar, Director of Distance Education at Bowling Green State University, has indirectly made possible the efforts herein reflected, since their diligence and professionalism allowed me the freedom at crucial moments during the project to travel for research or to siphon off time for its final editing. Finally, while we were completing the last stages of this volume, my wife Joan and I were trying to finish the building of a new home. As anyone who has ever tried such a foolish and audacious thing can testify, it can make for some tense (and intense) hours. Joan has been her usual patient, kind, and thoughtful self in shouldering the burden for all sorts of decisions and contingency planning for the house, liberating me to read, write, edit, and email incessantly. In the end, her contribution to this four-volume set is equal to any I can claim. These volumes are for the “Keeping Room” shelves, Sweetie. Enjoy them!

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Since I have never left them out of any book I have published, I will not become inconsistent or ungrateful now. My children, Matthew, Tracey, Mary, Casey, Justin, and Michael always inspire me to reach higher and perform at my best. Their love and encouragement make all the difference on those dark and stormy nights when you wonder whether even one more word will come forth. Each of them is an artist or creator in their own right, with plenty of books (and songs and movies) of their own on the horizon. Michael specifically enhances this text further by contributing one of the most significant essays in Volume 4; I should have turned him loose on more topics! My father, Bruce L. Edwards, Sr., has always been steadfast in his support and encouragement for my work, and I sincerely thank him for continuing to take such good care of all of us. As does God Himself.

Preface

Scholars and admirers alike have long sought a full-fledged, balanced biocritical treatment of the life and works of C. S. Lewis. They, rightly, seek a treatise that does justice to his remarkably successful, multiple careers as a Christian apologist, science fiction and fantasy writer, literary historian, poet, cultural critic, and historian of words. Such a book will be sympathetic without being sycophantic, incisive without being sensational, and comprehensive without being copious. It will illuminate his life and times, including his interesting friendships, his composing techniques, and, of course, his personal piety. Above all, it will also help explain his enormous impact on contemporary Christianity, particularly in America, and it will set in appropriate historical context the important contribution his scholarship makes to literary culture and social and ethical discourse in philosophy and theology. Until such a book arrives, if it ever does, this current four-volume set will represent the most lucid, most dispassionate, well-informed, up-to-date, and comprehensive treatment of Lewis’s life, times, and legacy to have so far been produced, exemplifying the highest standards of historical research and employing the most responsible tools of interpretation. It has been too typical of the variety of biographies now available on Lewis for their authors to range between two extremes: (1) works furtively focused on certain presumed negative personality traits and ambiguous relationships and incidents that obscure rather than illuminate Lewis’s faith and scholarship; or (2) works so enamored of Lewis that their work borders on or exceeds hagiography and offers page after page of redundant paraphrase of his putatively unique insights. The former, despite their protestations that they

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operate out of an objectivity missing in other treatments, or out of a respect and a healthy admiration for Lewis’s “literary accomplishments,” tend to be transparently premised on a rather tendentious amateur psychoanalysis and often programmatically dismiss Lewis’s readership in order to discredit his literary and theological judgments. The latter evince the effects of the worshipful homage, exhausting readers and convincing them that Lewis is readily reducible to a few doctrines, a few genres, and, perhaps, a few penchants. Even so, enough of Lewis’s enumerable strengths usually emerge even from these biographies to reward the Lewisian enthusiast or skeptical inquirer hungry for more informed assessment of his achievements, and his continuing impact. It is the case, nevertheless, that the underlying theme of recent works, and among them I include biographies written by Britain’s A. N. Wilson and Australia’s Michael White, have been to “rescue” Lewis from the assumed cult of his evangelical idolaters, particularly in America. It is these folks who, Wilson, for one, avers in his 1991 study of Lewis, desire to create a Lewis in their own image, one they can promote as a “virginal, Bible-toting, nonsmoking, lemonade-drinking champion for Christ.” But such a stance reflects a surprising naivet´e about Lewis’s American readership and barely disguises its contempt for the esteem accorded Lewis’s scholarship, fiction, and apologetics in many diverse circles. One aim of this present reference work is thus to correct such stereotypes of both Lewis and his readership. To accomplish this, and many more worthy goals, one must offer a thorough-going, well-researched, yet also theologically sensitive treatment of Lewis’s life and times that takes into consideration not only his tumultuous upbringing but also his mature development, his successes and failures, his blind spots and prescience, his trek into and impact on both “Jerusalem and Athens” (i.e., religion and philosophy), and, the essential perspective discerning readers need to understand the key people and relationships in his life. Consequently, assembled for this volume are contributions from the finest C. S. Lewis scholars from North America and Europe. Their essays, one and all, have been solicited to be expansive, comprehensive, informed, and selfcontained prose works that contextualize each respective topic historically and deliver expository clarity to its reader. As one considers the table of contents, he or she will realize that the essays fall into four volumes slated to emphasize four distinctive areas of Lewis’s life and work. Volume 1, C. S. Lewis: An Examined Life, is explicitly biographical in its orientation and scope. Lewis’s early life, collegiate days, military service, friendships, achievements, and ongoing impact are set in historical context, starting from his Belfast birth in 1898 to his auspicious death on November 22, 1963, the day U.S. President John Kennedy was assassinated. New

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essays illuminate his relationships with J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and his beloved wife, Joy Davidman Gresham. Volume 2, C. S. Lewis: Fantasist, Mythmaker, and Poet, focuses on Lewis’s imaginative writing, foregrounding his achievements in fiction and poetry as one dimension of his notoriety and popularity worldwide. The provenance of his works and their significance in his times and ours are explored and defined capably. Volume 3, C. S. Lewis: Apologist, Philosopher, and Theologian, draws attention to the celebrity Lewis received as a Christian thinker in his radio broadcasts and subsequent renown as a defender and translator of the Christian faith among skeptics and believers alike in postwar Britain and abroad. His well-known works such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and Letters to Malcolm are given close readings and careful explication. Finally, in Volume 4, C. S. Lewis: Scholar, Teacher, and Public Intellectual, Lewis’s lesser known vocations and publications are given careful consideration and examined for the models they may provide contemporary readers and academics for responsible scholarship. This set of essays helps assess Lewis’s ongoing legacy and offers an extensive annotated bibliography of secondary sources that can guide the apprentice scholar to worthy works that will further assist him or her in extending the insights this collection presents. Within each volume, essays fall into one of three distinct categories: (1) historical, fact-based treatment of eras, events, and personages in Lewis’s life; (2) expository and literary analysis of major Lewis works of imaginative literature, literary scholarship, and apologetics; (3) global essays that seek to introduce, elucidate, and unfold the connections between and among the genres, vocations, and respective receptions elicited by Lewis in his varied career. In my original invitation letter, each essayist was told to trust his or her instincts as a scholar, and thus to be empowered to write the essay from the unique vantage point they represent from inside their discipline. Generally speaking, each kind of essay was thus written to accomplish the following: r The historical essays begin with a well-documented overview of their topic, foreshad-

owing the era, events, personages, etc., then proceed to a chronological treatment of the particulars, interspersed with connections, informed interpretations, contextualizations that illuminate the specific era covered as well as illuminating their relationships to other historical circumstances, publications, etc. When readers finish the essay, they should have at hand all the essential facts, accurately and chronologically marshaled, with a confident sense of the significance of this period, era, or relationship for Lewis’s life and work. r Exposition and analysis essays focus on single works in the Lewis canon and offer the reader a comprehensive overview of the work, including coverage of its origins and place in Lewis’s life and times, its historical meaning and contemporary significance,

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its reception among readers, scholars, academics, critics, and a reflective judgment on its enduring influence or impact. The readers of these essays will come away with a profound grasp of the value and impact of the work in itself and the reputation it creates. In cases where there may exist a range of opinions about or competing interpretations of the meaning or value of a work, the essayist articulates the varying points of view, weighing their cogency, and offering the reader an informed perspective. r Global essays provide an introductory, broad contextual sweep of coverage over the main themes of an individual volume’s topic areas, one per volume, focusing on the four divisions enunciated for the project.

My general exhortation to all contributors was that they try as much as it is within their power to emulate C. S. Lewis in style and substance, practicing the kind of empathetic dialogue with the subject matter that is characteristic of his own prose and poetry—as he saw it: “Plenty of fact, reasoning as brief and clear as English sunshine . . .” No easy task! But I am pleased to say that each essay does its job well—and, in my view, Lewis would not be displeased. I want to make the distinction as clear as possible between the four volumes published here and the typical “companion to” or “encyclopedia of” approach found in other treatments of Lewis’s life and work. We have not created a set of “nominalist” texts that focus on so many particulars that the “whole” is lost in the “parts.” Ours is not a “flip-through” set of texts in which “key words” drive the construction of essays and the experience of the reader—but one that features holistic essays that engross and educate earnest readers seeking an inclusive view of the essay’s topic area. While we enforced some general consistency of length and depth of coverage, there is no “false objectivity” or uniformity of prose style to be imposed. No, by contrast, these essays are meant to have “personality,” and serve as “stand-alone” essays that reflect an invested, personal scholarship and whose learned opinion is based on deep acquaintance with their subject matter. As independent Lewis scholars, it is important that all were granted the freedom to interpret responsibly and offer informed judgments about value, effectiveness, and significance of components of his life, times, and works, and to follow the scholarly instincts and unique insights wherever they may have led. It may be that here and there two essays will cross boundaries, and offer a different point of view on a shared topic. This is to be expected, and is not to be discouraged. Where there are controversial topics in Lewis scholarship, the task at hand was to “referee” the debate, explain the options, and gently lead us to the conclusions, if any, that best fit the facts. The bibliography for each essay is intended to be as current as possible as we reached our publication deadline, and should reflect the span of scholarship

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that has emerged since Lewis’s death in 1963. But, there is a major and comprehensive bibliographic essay on Lewis scholarship included in Volume 4, and we direct the reader’s attention there. As in any reference set of this scope, there will be unavoidable overlap in coverage of events, people, theme, citation of works, etc., throughout the volumes, and I humbly submit this is one of its strengths. Our contributors were attracted to this project because they saw that it offered C. S. Lewis scholars an opportunity to disseminate their work to a broader, popular audience and, consequently, offered them the potential to shape the ongoing public understanding of C. S. Lewis for a population of readers around the world for many decades. Those readers brought to C. S. Lewis through the increased visibility and popularity of The Chronicles of Narnia, will be especially enthused and rewarded by their sojourn in these pages. Our common approach in writing and editing this set is “academic” in the sense that it relies on studies/research/corroborated knowledge and reflection on assigned topics, but it is also the case that we always kept our general audience in mind, avoiding as much as possible any insider jargon or technical language that tends to exclude general readers. (Of course, any well-founded disciplinary terms necessary to explain and/or exemplify the achievement of Lewis are introduced and explained in context.) In the end, I am proud to say that our desire to present accurate and interesting information, wearing our scholarship firmly but lightly enough to invite entrance into fascinating, timely, and relevant subject matter about Lewis has been met. These essays were designed to reach, engage, and even enthrall educated and interested readers anxious to find out more about C. S. Lewis, including those who yet may not have any formal training in literary criticism or theology or apologetics per se. Indeed, these have always been Lewis’s most appreciative and attentive readers, and we are most pleased to have joined him in welcoming you here. Bruce L. Edwards

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“Patches of Godlight”: C. S. Lewis as Imaginative Writer Bruce L. Edwards

Writers may not become what they are by nature, but they certainly do so by nurture. Childhood and adolescence seem in large measure to determine the destiny of those who become writers, and both what and how they write. The truism that the trials and tribulations, as well as the advantages and privileges (or lack thereof ), shape the formative behind-the-scenes story of countless authors, certainly includes C. S. Lewis. But his story needs no elaborate recounting here—it is told, eloquently and poignantly, by Lewis himself in his book Surprised by Joy, and is explained and illuminated in the first volume of this reference set by several competent contributors. It simply needs to be observed that what Lewis read, beginning as a precocious three-year-old and on through to his boarding school and wartime experiences (long before he landed in Oxford for collegiate schooling) had a profound effect not only on the man he became, but also on his concept of the vocation of authorship. As Lewis explained in Surprised by Joy: My father’s house was filled with books. . . . I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tile. Also, of endless

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books. . . . Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.1

Throughout his young life, whether immersed in children’s fiction like E. Nesbit’s The Amulet, or Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, or in poetry like Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf, the voracious reader Lewis became was alert to something more than just mundane plot details or poetic imagery—an intangible, numinous feeling pointing him beyond the natural and into the eternal. Myth and fairy tale ruled his imagination early on, and mediated this subtle but real transcendent touch. In addition, his deep friendship with his brother Warnie, whose penchant for creating miniature playsets, like the toy garden he invented for their mutual pleasure, gave Lewis his first encounter with a certain elusive feeling, which he first associated with autumn, and later with the calling of heaven. These were what his beloved romantic poet, William Wordsworth, called “intimations of immortality,” or, as Lewis put it liltingly toward the end of his life, “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”2 There were no artificial compartments in Lewis’s adult world—just as there were none during his early years; what he learned, cherished, embraced, rejected, refined, and championed—these find their way into everything he eventually wrote, prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. Authorship included, demanded some kind of uplink to the grand or grander narratives that help explain what it means to be human—and divine, whether created by myths or discovered through revelation. In recalling his conversion, Lewis directs his audience to the nineteenth-century Christian writer, George MacDonald, whose fantastic adventure, Phantastes, served as a corrective work that Lewis claims, in a memorable phrasing, “baptized his imagination.” It led Lewis to glimpse for the first time since his childhood a pathway into the realm of the supernatural, something he later recognizes as “holiness.” His famous summary statement of his journey to faith captures well the impact of his this text and others like them: In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—“Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.3

It should also be noted that what held the “Inklings”—the writing community shepherded by friends C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien—together beyond their common erudition and overlapping religious worldviews was the fact that they were superb craftsman in matters in which they were rank amateurs and infectious enthusiasts. Not a single Inkling was a trained or credentialed creative writer (if there could be such a thing as credentials for becoming a chronicler of Middle-Earth or Malacandra!) but rather had “day

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jobs,” which meant they would need to pursue their interests in imaginative writing as a hobby. As we know, Lewis did earn degrees in philosophy, as well as medieval and renaissance literature, but he confined neither his research nor his publication to these academic fields, prolific in them though he was. Rather, Lewis simultaneously maintained an active writing and publishing vocation in Christian apologetics, poetry, fantasy, science fiction, mythmaking, allegory, and the unique territory of “dream-vision” literature (inspired by writers as diverse as the Apostle John, Dante, St. Teresa of Avila, Coleridge, John Bunyan, and, again, George MacDonald). The adult Lewis shared an affection (some of his Oxford and Cambridge colleagues might have jadedly called it a weakness) with colleague Tolkien for popular literature and popular genres. Rather than dismissing the common reader and his or her seemingly misplaced love for lower-echelon fantastical novels about “interplanetary travel” or “swords and sorcery,” they embraced them, emulating and elevating these genres but also imbuing them with a complexity and a sophistication that ennobled their original practitioners (for example, Jules Verne or H. G. Wells) and those who read them. A case in point is Lewis’s well-known interest in Scottish writer, John Buchan, the early twentieth-century creator of both the imaginative “shocker,” featuring wickedness in high places, elemental spirits, mysterious curses, ghosts and demons, all exemplifying the interpenetration of the modern world by the ancient and pagan; as well as the conspiracy or espionage “thriller” that reveals the thin layer of honesty, courage, and honor that upholds civilization and the rule of law, and how one brave man or woman can tip the scales toward decency, civility, and justice. It is the Buchan hero, someone like Richard Hannay of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, the ordinary fellow caught up in extraordinary circumstances, who inspires Lewis’s own protagonist, Edwin Ransom in Out of the Silent Planet, and hero of the rest of the Space trilogy. (Without Buchan, it is safe to say, there would not have been an Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and certainly no John le Carr´e, the master of the contemporary spy novel.) SEEING WITH THE HEART As his literary career evolved, Lewis wrote well-received works of science fiction, wise and sprightly volumes of Christian apologetics, and many learned tomes on medieval and renaissance literature, but his heart was always centered in myth and fairy-tale. His greatest triumph and most enduring works were destined to be his Narnian tales. Indeed, the question most people want to ask C. S. Lewis after they read The Chronicles of Narnia is well expressed by a young reader, Meredith, who wrote to him three years before his death in 1963, asking, “What inspired your books?” Lewis replied: “Really I don’t

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know. Does anyone know where exactly an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn’t say.”4 Ah, those pictures! When he explained the origins of Narnia, Lewis always pointed to these recurring images: All my seven Narnian books, and my three science-fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. They all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: “Let’s try to make a story about it.” At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there he pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the other six Narnian stories in after Him.”5

One doubts it can be put more simply or eloquently than that. Aslan pulled the stories together—and Lewis himself—into Narnia. And that is probably as good a description as any of what happens to us when we enter the wardrobe. Aslan pulls us in, and we keep seeing pictures in our head. How intriguing to witness the intrepid Lucy and the irreverent Edmund stumbling into the chill and wonder of wintry Narnia, meeting up with such contrasting Narnian characters. How interesting that it is Mr. Tumnus, the faun with the umbrella and parcels, whom Lucy first sees, and that it is the wicked white witch who is waiting to greet Edmund. How different their respective reactions are to hearing that “Aslan is on the move”! But none of this should surprise us too much. The emphasis in Lewis’s fiction (and nonfiction) is always “seeing with the heart,” of apprehending images and tracing metaphors that instill faith and inspire journeys into the never-never land of the spirit. For the heart reveals our true character, and, ultimately, where our treasure is. And the perfect genre for hosting such stories and themes is the fairy-tale. Tolkien himself made explicit the connection between how fairy-tales touch the soul and how the Gospel account of the incarnation embodies “true history” in a fascinating lecture called “On Fairy-Stories”: The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and at the same time powerfully symbolic and allegorical; and among the marvels, the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has preeminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the

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supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath. It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy, that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. . . . Because this story is supreme; and it is true, Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused. But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.6

Tolkien’s words—especially his neologism for the death and resurrection of Christ, the “eucatastrophe,” meaning, oxymoronically, a “tragedy with a happy ending”—capture the delight he and Lewis shared in this literary form, but they also prepare us to recognize and engage the spiritual insight we may encounter in Lewis’s postconversion fiction. Later Lewis himself summarized his own convictions on the topic of how “myth” works in understanding the historical fact of the incarnation, not as the relatively recent convert as he was in 1931, but now as a completely persuaded and notable apologist for Christianity: As myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. . . . Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are indeed to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded . . . that what became Fact was a Myth, that it carries with it into the world of Fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology [emphasis, Lewis].7

The fairy-tale was perfectly suited as a vehicle for expressing transcendent truth and provided for Lewis in particular the perfect “canvas” on which to paint the “pictures in his head” that in words became the Narnian tales. What Lewis observes of Tolkien’s achievement in his original review of The

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Hobbit (published first in the October 2, 1937 edition of The Times Literary Supplement) could equally be said of his Space Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, and certainly in Till We Have Faces: The publishers claim that The Hobbit, though very unlike Alice [in Wonderland], resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits to a world of its own—a world that seems to have been going on long before we stumbled into but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone.8

The worlds Lewis created, even before he became a Christian, are inherently spiritual and betray his inclination toward the transcendent. Postconversion, Lewis deftly uses the conventions of the fairy-tale to depict for us a winsome and whimsical landscape that stirs our heart and directs our soul, mind, and strength toward the world beyond this one. To inhabit that elusive but accessible world, Lewis believed, we must be poised to receive a story grander than one we have ever been told before—but a narrative and an experience after all, and thus resonating with all the stories we have read or heard nonetheless. In so doing, we come to see that first and foremost, Glome, Perelandra, The Great Divorce’s heaven, Narnia, like Middle-Earth, is a world “you cannot anticipate . . . before you go there, . . . and cannot forget . . . once you have gone.” Still, Lewis cautioned that in his fiction, he was not creating allegories requiring a one-for-one parallel with personages and events in the Gospels, but a series of “supposals,” as Lewis reckoned it. What if the Son of God were incarnate in a world like Narnia—what would happen? What if we discovered an unfallen planet and fellow humans were conspiring to bring it to ruin like our own world has suffered? What if we could glimpse for a night the realities of the next world on a bus ride between heaven and hell, and see ourselves from the perspective of eternity? How would these tales unfold and how would we receive the news they bring? ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS Lewis’s poetry and fiction inevitably raise key questions for the modern consciousness he faced, as well as the contemporary one today’s readers inhabit. Why should it matter what and how one imagines, dreams, or invents? Why can’t we just be logical, fact-based folk, who operate out of reason, and from reason, responsibility, and from responsibility, performance of duty. Do we really need

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to use anything but pure logic? Why can’t we, as rules become apparent, just obey them, build community around them, and be happy? Isn’t the imagination something that just gets us into trouble? The world of the imagination is not just the terrain inhabited by artists, musicians, scriptwriters, novelists, and quilters—it’s the domain of every human being . . . and, in Lewis’s understanding, it is how God made us, how we are to negotiate the world to reckon with what we euphemistically call “thought lives.” What could a phrase like that mean, except that the world we envision in our hearts and minds is different from the one we “actually” inhabit? And, if so, what does that imply for how we can shape our “real world” by the potential or unrealized ones in our heads? Lewis had an answer. The fact is, he suggested, we never fully live our lives out on the surface— we are never completely logical creatures; we are, in fact, made in the image of God, and therefore, spiritual, and because God imagines, invents, and creates the world, so, too, are we involved in an imaginative enterprise that determines whether we live lives of “quiet desperation” or meaningful engagement with the world He is redeeming, including our imagination. Why should we care about our imagination? Doesn’t it just get us into trouble? Well, Lewis, opines: Yes, the unused and undisciplined imagination does offer trouble—when it is inactive or used sparingly for, let’s face it, cheap thrills, petty lusts, minor envies, when we neglect it in favor of satisfying mere bodily appetites, yes, the imagination becomes less a vital, spiritual force, and more a temporary escape from the mundane, a wasteful trek into fantasyland where we’re the hero or the villain, exacting our revenge or extracting our glory. Lewis called this “morbid, egoistic castle-building.” Morbid because it is unproductive, noncontributory to one’s growth, focused on what is dead or dying; egoistic, because it is merely self-gratifying, self-congratulatory, “incessant autobiography”; castle building because it is merely elevated daydreaming, the construction of the unattainable in pursuit of the unworthy. I’m not going to live in a castle; I am not a king, and besides the fuel bills are outrageous. The ultimate problem with such mis- and disuse of the imagination for Lewis is that he believed it was given to us for so much more. The redeemed and discipled imagination, like the redeemed and discipled intellect—intellect as reason and logic in service of extending heaven’s rule on earth—is meant to enlarge our vision, encourage our hearts, and engage us in the battle for and nurture of souls. So, why, Lewis asks Socratically, did God give us this nature, this tool, this ability, one that can both enslave and liberate, enhance and debilitate? Simply this: because we are to be like God in every way, we partake of Him by exercising our imagination. If we don’t feed our imagination and put it to godly use, the vacuum will be filled with something else, something

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that at best will merely distract or divert us, or, something that at worst may derail and divorce us from our heavenly pathway. OUR ALTERNATE HISTORY In his fiction, Lewis is determined to turn hearts toward this “true country,” to rewrite its unknown or faded history in our hearts, by drawing attention to the “echoes” that already exist in our imagination. From Middle-earth to Narnia, from Perelandra to Cair Paravel, and on to Mordor and Malacandra, Lewis and Tolkien call upon all of us to reenchant the cosmos, keeping alive the promise and animating the search for the world beyond the world. They point us to the surprising reality of the fellowship of heaven to be glimpsed in Lewis’s Space trilogy, his Chronicles of Narnia, or in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. In engaging his fiction, Lewis would have us come to see “imagination” as the divinely given human faculty of comprehending reality through the use of images, pictures, shapes, patterns: seeing what is, seeing what was, and seeing what could be, through artistic “representation.” It is the counterpart and complement to reason. We come to know what is true not only through words and propositions, but also through what is mediated beyond the words, in the heart, “groanings too deep to be uttered.” It is by the imagination that we are called upon to grasp, negotiate, understand the world directly before us, and as well the world just beyond them in pictures and images that create their own reality. Lewis’s conviction was that it is through our imagination that we are thereby enabled to fashion representations of and alternatives to reality, for imagination engages both creation and interaction with the cosmos, not just static gazing. Through the tools of the imagination, art imitates life and life imitates art, reality leaking through both: the products of creative imagination becoming part of the reality that is in turn engaged by that same imagination. In fact, it is our encounter with art actualized by the imagination that helps us “defamiliarize” what has become habitual and mundane in our world, and allows us to revise (or re-see) it as it is—permitting personal change and godly renewal. Great hymns, great novels, great movies, and great sermons can do this. Now Lewis held that the Christian imagination at work in Narnia and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is imagination illuminated by revelation, by the life and light of Jesus Christ. It is, as we saw in the passage earlier, an echo of the metaphor the Apostle Paul chooses to inform his prayer for the Ephesians’ illumination in chapter 1, verses 18–19, what we called earlier, “seeing with the heart”: I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in

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the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. (New International Version)

This is one of Paul’s most arresting metaphors—one that offers an initially strange image of two essential organs sharing a vital function: how does one “see with the heart”? It is clearly the case that sometimes “the eyes of our heart” but must be further enlightened for us to understand what logic alone cannot reveal, and that we can be oblivious to something God wishes us to know but which we cannot apprehend only through the “head.” For instance, it is possible for one to read the New Testament as a piece of literature or history, and thereby come to know facts about Jesus of Nazareth intellectually as a “man with a message.” But if we learn to “see with the heart,” Lewis would aver, He emerges as more than that; He is the Son of God, and, not only that, He is a Shepherd, the King of Kings, the Morning Star, the Way, the Truth, the Life, but, still further, He is also a Lamb, and, most certainly, a Lion. All true, but all images, all captured first in the heart, and then only with the intellect. This set of principles is what Lewis, Tolkien, and the other Inklings took to be foundational to what they called mythopoeia—or the act of new mythmaking. Myth for them was not defined as a legendary tale told with dubious authority; but instead it was the grand overarching narrative that created the reason to be, and to become, for members of the village, the polis, and the nation, touched by its encompassing themes, images, characters, and plot lines. Neither antihistorical, nor ahistorical, myth evokes awe, wonder, passion, and, what’s more, pursuit—a culture’s myth is the story that has the power to explain the origin and destiny of a people, the text that orients them in history, guides them in the present, and points them to a future in which they and their offspring will live, and move, and have their being. It places them in the presence of their Creator and Benefactor, Judge or Advocate, and answers the questions when, how, who, and why. A “true myth,” has the power to explain where we came from, shape our identity and purpose, instill hope, promote justice, and sustain order. The only reliable, encompassing world story or Grand Narrative, the one integral to Lewis’s craft and motive, as well as the Inklings, is found in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, and it has provided cultures from Asia to Africa, and Europe to South and North America, just such a frame for working out their place (and salvation) in the cosmos with fear and trembling. For the Inklings, this forms the true history of our planet, of all peoples, and the only trustworthy forecast of our destiny. But the biblical narrative has been crowded out or discarded in civilizations that have ignored its relevant witness and forgotten its historical impact. How does one go about getting recovering postmoderns to take a second or third look at its testimony?

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The Inklings’ answer was to create fantasies and new myths, a “Neverland,” which could yet serve as an “alternate history,” a winsome, redemptive, inclusive worldview that would restore personal dignity and a promised destiny to those with ears to hear, and eyes to see. A history alternate to what? Simply put, it is the alternative to the false history written in the rise of a dehumanizing and disenchanting naturalism that reduces men, women, children, and even whole civilizations to instincts, impulses, genetics, and the environment: “cosmic accidents” whose dreams and visions nevertheless point them to longings they cannot account for in purely “scientific” terms. In a later review of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Lewis defends his friend’s choice of genre by explaining why the fairy-tale may be the best medium for accomplishing the heady goal of redirecting wayfarers to their real identity and homeland: But why some ask, why if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never never land of your own? Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is that of mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by “character delineation” is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a while, man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? In the book, Eomer rashly contrasts “the green earth” with “legends,” and Aragorn replies that the green earth itself is a “a mighty matter of legend.” The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which been hidden by the veil of familiarity. . . . If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.9

“The veil of familiarity” is a telling phrase; in the realm of the fantastic, within mythic landscapes, vistas, and perspectives—anything might happen, anything might be discovered. One is not restricted by what he or she knows of the “real world,” its colors, shapes, creatures, languages, and predicaments. The author of fantasy can use these but also invent still more—thus intermixing them with the familiar and the real to create a “secondary” world that envelops and surpasses both. These alternate histories rescue readers from the “veil of familiarity,” ushering them into a transcendent realm unreachable by mere reason or coldhearted induction. We do not “retreat from reality,” Lewis reminds, “we rediscover it.” This is certainly the case with C. S. Lewis’s greatest creations: the landscapes of the Space Trilogy, the foreboding domain of Glome in Till We Have Faces, and, of course, the glorious kingdom of Narnia. In our mythical sojourns with his characters, Lewis indeed renews in us a longing for “the scent of a

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flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”10 Long before Willy Wonka or Harry Potter appeared on the scene, C. S. Lewis was “reenchanting a cosmos” that had been emptied of significance by those twentieth century thinknocrats who reduced the universe to mere numbers or human life to bodily appetites and genetic impulses. With a little help from his friends, Lewis has managed to establish an outpost on the edge of darkness, opening the wardrobe door to help us find the object of our longing, and the true end of our journey. NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 10. 2. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm (New York: Harcourt, 1963), 91. 3. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 189. 4. C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis’s Letters to Children, ed. Lyle Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 68–69. 5. C. S. Lewis, “It All Began with a Picture,” in On Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, 1982), 53. 6. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” ed. C. S. Lewis, Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 83–84. 7. C. S. Lewis, “Myth Become Fact,” God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 66–67. 8. C. S. Lewis, “Review of The Hobbit,” in On Stories, 81–82. 9. C. S. Lewis, “Review of The Lord of the Rings,” in On Stories, 89–90. 10. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 5.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, 1955. ———. Letters to Malcolm. New York: Harcourt, 1963. ———. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965. ———. God in the Dock. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. ———. On Stories. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt, 1982. ———. C. S. Lewis’s Letters to Children. Edited by Lyle Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead. New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” Edited by C. S. Lewis, Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.

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Rehabilitating H. G. Wells: C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet David C. Downing

C. S. Lewis’s dedication for Out of the Silent Planet reads: “To my brother W. H. L. / a life-long critic of the space-and-time story.” This tribute to Warren Hamilton Lewis seems straightforward enough, but it contains a double entendre that his brother and the other Inklings must have enjoyed. Jack sometimes used the “space-and-time story” as a synonym for science fiction or fantasy.1 But he also used “space-and-time” to refer to the physical universe, the only reality admitted by materialist philosophers. For Warren to be “a lifelong critic of the space-and-time story” meant that he was a seasoned reader of the sort of books Jack had written; it also identified him as one who had long suspected that the physical universe is not “the whole show.” This little inside joke is a synecdoche of the entire Ransom trilogy: Lewis offers his readers some lively specimens of interplanetary fantasy. But he also means to plant in their imaginations a suggestion that there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophies. Critics often assume that Lewis deliberately chose fantasy literature as an imaginative instrument to express his vision of the cosmos. But the truth is just the reverse: Lewis did not simply adopt fantasy as a didactic vehicle after his conversion to Christianity; rather it was his love of fantasy, myth, and romance that led him to faith in the first place. In the trilogy he recapitulates this process for his readers: first he tries to enchant them with fantasy worlds

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of wonder and danger, battlefields of good and evil; then gradually he reveals a correlation between these new, absorbing, fantasies and some old doctrines whose familiarity may have bred contempt in his readers, or at least indifference. The recovery of childhood things that Lewis himself experienced is one he wants to pass on to others. The actual writing of the trilogy began in 1937. Lewis and his good friend J. R. R. Tolkien agreed that there simply were not enough of their favorite sort of stories available, so they decided to try their own hand at it. Lewis proposed that each should write an “excursionary thriller,” his a space-story and Tolkien’s a time-story, both leading to the discovery of Myth.2 Accordingly, Tolkien began a story called “The Lost Road,” and Lewis, composing much more rapidly, completed a draft of Out of the Silent Planet, reading it in installments at weekly meetings of the Inklings. Lewis sent the manuscript first to J. M. Dent and Sons, who returned it. Then he sent it to Allen and Unwin, who had published Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Again it was not accepted, despite a letter from Tolkien defending it against some rather woolly minded criticisms from the publisher’s reader. (This letter remains one of the most perceptive brief treatments of Lewis’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer.)3 The manuscript was then accepted by a house in London called the Bodley Head, who published it in the autumn of 1938. Out of the Silent Planet was widely reviewed, but only a few commentators noticed the theological implications of the story. The year after the first book of the trilogy was published, Lewis wrote to a friend: “You will be both grieved and amused to hear that out of about 60 reviews only 2 showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but an invention of my own. But if there only were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England: any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.”4 Lewis’s mention of only two reviews in sixty sounds hyperbolic, but a survey of Out of the Silent Planet reviews confirms his reckoning as essentially accurate. One reviewer, for example, confesses that he read Out of the Silent Planet twice and still could find no allegorical significance.5 Another concludes that “Out of the Silent Planet, beautifully written as some of it is, does not seem quite to have grown from any conviction.”6 One can hardly imagine a more inaccurate observation. Out of the Silent Planet is written with all of Lewis’s convictions, with his whole worldview, in the background. He began the trilogy as a deliberate critique of what he called Evolutionism, a philosophy that projects Darwinism into the metaphysical sphere, speculating that humankind may eventually evolve into its own species of divinity, jumping from planet to planet and star to star. H. G. Wells was probably the most articulate and widely read proponent of this philosophy,

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so Lewis set out to create a Wellsian fantasy with a counter-Wellsian theme. Though one finds the idea of Evolutionism in Olaf Stapledon, G. B. Shaw, and C. H. Waddington, Lewis said that Evolutionism could, with some justice, be dubbed “Well-sianity.”7 Lewis began the Ransom trilogy because he feared that Evolutionism was beginning to capture the popular imagination. Soon after the publication of Out of the Silent Planet, he wrote to Roger Lancelyn Green, later to become his biographer: “What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men [1930], and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds [1927], both of which seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook which I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole inter-planetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what has hitherto been used by the opposite side.”8 The following year Lewis explained to another correspondent who had asked about the origins of Out of the Silent Planet: “The danger of ‘Westonism’ I meant to be real. What set me about writing the book was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonisation quite seriously, and the realisation that thousands of people in one form or another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human species for the whole meaning of the universe—that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity.”9 Last and First Men (1930), the first book mentioned above, offers Stapledon’s prophetic panorama of our species’ future, including an invasion of earth by cloud-creatures from Mars; the laboratory development of a new, improved type of humans, all brains and hands; the colonization of Venus and Neptune; and the eventual extinction of humanity two billion years in the future. Near the end of the story, one member of the species who represents almost pure intelligence explains the transcendent purpose that has guided all humans from continent to continent, and then planet to planet: “The task that was undertaken had to be completed. For the Scattering of the Seed has come for every one of us the supreme religious duty. Even those who continually sin against it recognize this as the last office of man.”10 For someone like Lewis, this would represent the worst of all possible worlds. The philosophy of scattering the seed as a sacred obligation could easily justify experiments on animal and human subjects, as well as extermination of other species, whether on our own planet or on others. Yet even Stapledon seems to concede that such a goal serves no ultimate purpose. In the end he seems to agree with Bertrand Russell that “only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul’s edifice henceforth be built.”11 J. B. S. Haldane, the other writer whom Lewis hoped to answer in Out of the Silent Planet, was a Cambridge biochemist who championed the cause of science against those in the humanities and the churches, whom he considered

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reactionaries. Haldane was something of a latter-day Jeremy Bentham, an uncompromising logician who tended to tackle ethical and aesthetic questions in terms of utility and efficiency. In his little book Callinicus (1925), for example, he offers a vigorous, if chilling, defense of chemical warfare as no more inhumane than conventional weapons. In Possible Worlds (1927), he argues for scientific research on animals, noting that those opposed to his laboratory experiments on rats would probably not think twice about poisoning rats that had infested the family home. (Lewis, for one, was consistent in this regard: he was an antivivisectionist and also one who never set traps for the mice in his rooms at Oxford.12 ) The essay in Possible Worlds that unsettled Lewis was one entitled “Man’s Destiny.” There Haldane rhapsodizes about “man’s taking his own evolution in hand” and of the possibilities of our species literally conquering the cosmos. He surmises that humans might eventually be able to overcome all disease and disability, and that the “exceptional man” of the future will be able to think like Isaac Newton, compose like J. S. Bach, paint like the Old Masters, and live as simply and lovingly as Francis of Assisi. Haldane concludes with an almost breathless prophecy about humans conquering space and eventually, it would seem, death itself: Men will certainly attempt to leave the earth. The first voyagers into interstellar space will die. . . . There is no reason why their successors should not succeed in colonising some, at least, of the other planets of our system, and ultimately the planets, if such exist, revolving around other stars than our sun. There is no theoretical limit to man’s material progress but the subjection to complete conscious control of every atom and every quantum of radiation in the universe. There is, perhaps, no limit at all to his intellectual and spiritual progress.13

Such visions for the future, which now seem rather quixotic, appeared to Lewis as potentially very dangerous. The idea that humans may one day evolve ¨ into Ubermensch was for Lewis the latest variant of the serpent’s temptation to Eve: “Ye shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5, kjv). A program of helping evolution do its work could also be used to justify all manner of atrocities against other species or against “inferior” members of the human species. Such a theory comes dangerously close to Hitler’s dream of a “master race,” a parallel that Lewis underscores in That Hideous Strength. Apart from debunking Evolutionism, Lewis also hoped that taking his readers on an imaginative voyage to another world would give them a new perspective on this one. Charles Moorman has stated the underlying strategy of the trilogy most succinctly: “Lewis’s main aim in the creation of the silent-planet myth is to create and maintain a metaphor that will serve to carry in fictional form the basic tenets of Christianity and present them from

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a non-Christian point of view, but without reference to normal Christian symbols.”14 Though his initial impulse for writing interplanetary romance may not have been quite as calculatedly didactic as Moorman suggests, Lewis does portray a cosmos ruled by a benevolent god, whose loyal subjects—angels and human—must daily battle the dark and fallen rulers of this world. In fact, Lewis’s fictional representations are representations of the central doctrines of Christian myth. COSMIC VOYAGE AS SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE In the first paragraph of Out of the Silent Planet, the protagonist is not introduced by name but rather referred to as “the Pedestrian.”15 The term seems appropriate enough to describe a man on a walking tour, waiting out a thundershower under a chestnut tree. But the word is capitalized all three times it is used, as if referring to an allegorical character out of John Bunyan, one whose outer journey will reflect his soul’s progress. In the second paragraph the Pedestrian is identified as Ransom, a Cambridge philologist on a solitary walking tour. He is a tall, round-shouldered man, of thirty-five to forty years, with a certain shabbiness of dress that marks a university professor on holiday. At first glance, one cannot help but notice how much this description fits Lewis himself. He was in his late thirties when he wrote Out of the Silent Planet. He was of middle height, and was described as round-shouldered by more than one who knew him. And his shabbiness of dress was legendary. Those who first met him often thought he looked more like a gardener, a butcher, or a country farmer than a university don. Continuing in Out of the Silent Planet, readers soon learn that Ransom is a bachelor, an antivivisectionist, and a Christian. All of these traits remind us again of the author himself. Lewis commented that Ransom was not meant to be a self-portrait. But whatever his intentions, he created in Ransom a character whose convictions and consciousness closely resembled his own. The opening pages of Out of the Silent Planet describe experiences that Lewis himself might have had on one of his walking tours. But when Ransom stops in at an isolated country house being rented by Edward Weston, a noted scientist, and Dick Devine, a former schoolmate, his adventures begin in earnest. Sensing something vaguely sinister about their intentions toward a simpleminded boy who works for them, Ransom nevertheless accepts a drink, discovering too late that he has been drugged. He loses consciousness and dreams about trying to escape from a walled garden, getting stuck with one leg outside the wall and one leg inside. This dream marks Ransom’s departure from the world of the ordinary and his entry into Other Worlds. The contents of the dream make little sense to

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someone reading Out of the Silent Planet for the first time, but later readings reveal it to be a symbolic prophecy of Ransom’s adventures on Mars and Venus. The garden represents planet earth, and Ransom’s straddling position suggests that from this time forth he will have a dual identity—partly a dweller of this world, partly a citizen of other worlds. When he starts to come to, Ransom makes a feeble attempt to escape, but he is soon knocked unconscious again. Awakening the next time in an eerie metal chamber, he realizes that he is traveling in space and feels poised between “delirious terror or an ecstasy of joy” (p. 23). He fears for his own sanity as he contemplates the idea of traveling so far from earth into the dark vastness that separates the worlds. But when he looks out the window, Ransom is not appalled but rather awed by the splendid scene spread before his eyes. He sees “planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations undreamed of,” which look like “celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold” sparkling upon the fabric of “undimensioned, enigmatic blackness” (p. 31). As the voyage continues, Ransom feels there must be a “spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart.” He comes to realize that the modern concept of “Space,” suggesting a vast, cold, dead abyss between the planets, seems an almost blasphemous term to describe the “empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam.” Ransom concludes that “older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory” (p. 32), thus choosing the words of the psalmist (Ps 19:1) over those of the scientist. Having awakened to a whole new set of realities, Ransom begins a long pilgrimage of purgation and illumination. Lewis called Out of the Silent Planet “Ransom’s enfance,”16 portraying Ransom as a man who, though in his middle years, is in his soul’s childhood. Indeed, on the voyage to Mars, Ransom is compared to a “frightened child.” Overcoming fear is the first great task that Ransom faces. Though he is a Cambridge don, a distinguished linguist, and a religious man, his attainments and beliefs are not of very great help in his present time of trouble. On the voyage to Mars, Ransom indeed has excellent reasons to be afraid. He has been drugged, knocked over the head, kidnapped, dragged into outer space, and has overheard a conversation about his being turned over to some alien beings called “sorns”. This last bit of news plays havoc with his already overcharged imagination. Having (like Lewis) grown up reading science fiction, Ransom visualizes aliens with “twitching feelers, rasping wings, slimy coils, and curling tentacles,” assuming they will embody some “monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty” (p. 35). Once Ransom and his abductors land on Mars, his first surprise is to find a landscape of surpassing beauty. Later on, he will learn that the inhabitants

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of Mars, who call their world Malacandra, are not at all like the nightmarish visions of his imagination. There are three rational species on the planet, very different from each other, but all benign and living in harmony. Escaping from Weston and Devine, Ransom wanders on his own for a while and then befriends human-sized otter-like creatures called “hrossa,” learning some of their speech. A pious man, he begins to wonder if he should undertake to instruct them in his faith. But they have their own well-defined convictions, and it is they who marvel at his ignorance. They tell him that their world is ruled by Oyarsa, who is himself subject to Maleldil the Young, who created their world and who lives with the Old One. After further conversations with another rational species, the sorns, and with Oyarsa, the ruler of Malacandra, Ransom comes to understand that Maleldil the Young created the Field of Arbol (the solar system) and all the beings in it. He chose an Oyarsa, or tutelary intelligence, to rule each world, served by nearly imperceptible beings called “eldila.” However, on the third planet, the Oyarsa and some of his eldils rose up in rebellion against Maleldil, recognizing no authority but themselves. Led by the Bent Oyarsa, this world was now cut off from the others and thus called Thulcandra, “the Silent Planet.” It remains a battleground, though there are rumors in Deep Heaven of wondrous things performed by Maleldil to reclaim his lost world. This is certainly the stuff of science fiction. It is also orthodox Christian theology, as it might be understood in an unfallen, hierarchical world. In response to inquiries about the trilogy’s symbolism, Lewis explained straightforwardly that the Old One and Maleldil the Young represent the Father and the Son of the Trinity, and that eldils represented angels, and the Bent One was Satan. Lest it seem blasphemous to add new chapters to Christian doctrine, he also explained that his stories were a form of “imagining out loud,” speculations in fiction about “what God might be supposed to have done in other worlds.”17 Despite the reassurances of the gentle hrossa, Ransom’s anxiety about meeting some alien monstrosity on this planet reemerges when he first travels to meet a sorn, and later when he is called for an audience with Oyarsa. Yet as the story progresses, one can see that his nearly debilitating fears early in his adventure are becoming more and more manageable. When Ransom does eventually meet a large insect-like creature called a pfifltrigg, he finds it comic rather than horrific. (The name pfifltrigg is, in fact, Lewis’s coinage, from two Old Icelandic words that combine to mean “safe monster.”)18 At the end of the story, Ransom and his two fellow earthlings come before Oyarsa, the ruler of that world. Ransom serves as a translator so that Weston and Devine can try to explain themselves to Oyarsa (whom they cannot see and dismiss as a deception of some kind). Oyarsa discovers how truly depraved these fallen humans are, the one by ruthless self-love, the other by a ruthless

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ideology of human conquest over other worlds. In the end, the ruler of that world determines that all three should return to where they came from. Before returning to his home planet, which will never again quite be home, Ransom receives this farewell counsel from the presiding spirit of Malacandra: “You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended” (p. 142). The return flight is indeed a difficult one, and Ransom does emerge largely purged of his fears. But most of his cure has came on Malacandra itself. One can see how different a person Ransom has become by comparing his terror at watching the “Earthrise” from space early in the story (pp. 22–24) to his exultant memories of watching the planet Jupiter rise from Malacandra in the closing pages of the book (pp. 159–60). When asked about his portrayal of Oyarsa and his eldils as nearly invisible, Lewis replied that he was drawing upon the medieval idea that angels have bodies made of ether, the lighter-than-air substance that fills the space between heavenly spheres. But Lewis’s quip about smuggling theology into people’s minds under the cover of light fiction suggests that his portrayal of the eldils was part of a larger strategy to help readers look at old doctrines with new eyes. If eldils appeared to Ransom clad in radiant garments and announced, “Fear not,” their identity would be so recognizable as to be dismissible. Lewis enjoyed subverting his readers’ certainty about the barriers between the natural and the supernatural, between myth and history. Lewis’s strategy here is an ambitious one, and critics differ about how successfully he is able to blend fantasy and theology. But part of what makes his approach intriguing is the way the theological implications of Ransom’s adventures emerge by “progressive revelation.” As attested by the reviewers quoted above, a good many readers can finish Out of the Silent Planet without ever identifying Maleldil with God. Or for that matter they may finish the book without recognizing the thematic implications of the Oyarsa, the eldils, or the creatures called “hnau.” For one thing, readers may be confused by the name “Maleldil.” If eldils are angels, then “Maleldil” suggests the meaning “bad angel.” Obviously, this title does not fit a benevolent divinity, so critics have expended a great deal of ingenuity trying to unlock the meaning of the name. William Norwood suggests that it might stand for “male eldil,” since maleness in hierarchical societies is associated with higher authority.19 J. R. Christopher finds its roots in AngloSaxon mal, “an agreement or judgment” and ealdor, “lord,” interpreting the name to mean “Lord of Judgment” or “Lord of the Agreement/Covenant.”20 Perhaps most convincing is Evan Gibson’s speculation that “Mal” is taken from the Hebrew word for “king,” so that “Maleldil” means “king of all

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spirits,” or more familiarly, “Lord of Hosts.”21 Lewis himself said that he knew of no conscious connections between the language of Malacandra and actual languages, saying he wanted the words to have “emotional, not intellectual suggestiveness.” He added that the quality in the name “Maleldil” that appealed to him was the liquidity of its sound.22 Perhaps it is best to let the matter rest there. Readers who do sense parallels between Maleldil and the God of Christianity may still be puzzled by the Oyarsa and his eldils. Neither of these seems to fit the usual notions of angels. Lewis explains at the end of the story that the word Oyarses comes from Bernardus Silvestris, a twelfth-century Platonist. The Oyarsa is the tutelary spirit of the planet, a higher order of angel responsible to rule that sphere (p. 152). Some early readers of Out of the Silent Planet thought the Oyarsa was Lewis’s image of God,23 but that is a careless reading. The hrossa tell Ransom that Maleldil made and ruled their world and that the Oyarsa is subject to him (p. 68). Far from being omniscient, the Oyarsa of Malacandra wants to hear from Ransom what Maleldil has done on earth, the silent planet. He wants Ransom to confirm stories that Maleldil “has taken strange counsel and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra” (p. 121). And when Ransom explains the traditions he knows on the subject, the Oyarsa shows that even a majestic spirit like himself can be awed by the deeds of Maleldil: “You have shown me more wonders than are known in the whole of heaven” (p. 142). The wonders Ransom told the Oyarsa about were the life, death, and the resurrection of Christ, which atoned for the sin of Adam and broke the power of the Bent One. To confirm that this is what Lewis has in mind, note the Oyarsa’s phrasing about his wanting to hear what Maleldil has done on Thulcandra: “It is a thing we desire to look into.” This is taken word for word from 1 Peter 1:12, where the suffering of Christ and the glory that followed are described as “things which angels desire to look into.” Here Lewis cleverly takes theological doctrines that readers might find dull or unpalatable and reshapes them into an interplanetary battle scenario more compelling than most of the science fiction available in the pulps. The passage from 1 Peter also confirms that the Oyarsa and his eldils are Lewis’s representations of angels, although we find no harps or halos on Malacandra. In fact, they are so unlike biblical or traditional pictures of angels that one young reader asked Lewis if they were supposed to represent fairies.24 Lewis’s portrayal of the eldila clearly illustrates his strategy of representing old doctrines in new literary forms. He well knew that angels in the Bible are never portrayed with harps and halos. He reminded one reader that angels who appear in scripture nearly always excite terror in those who see them

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and that the word kherub in Hebrew referred not to “horrid little fat baby ‘cherubs’” but to a creature like the fabled Gryphon, with the body of a lion and wings of eagles.25 In The Discarded Image Lewis laments the increasingly disappointing portrayal of angels he finds in Western literature. After the “unrivalled majesty” of Dante’s angels come the classicist angels of Milton, with “too much anatomy and too much armour” and behaving too much like characters out of Homer or Virgil. After Milton, Lewis finds “total degradation,” ending in “the purely consolatory, and hence waterishly feminine, angels of the nineteenth century art.”26 In trying to find a model for his eldils, Lewis must have considered first what he considered to be the best portrayal of an angel in imaginative literature27 : the heavenly messenger in the Inferno who strides through the fifth circle of hell on God’s errand, parting the lost souls at his feet and opening the gate of Dis with just a wave of his hand (pp. 9, 76–103). Lewis’s eldils have some of the majesty and self-possession of Dante’s stern messenger, but none of his overwhelming presence. In fact, the eldils on Malacandra are just on the margins of perception. If Lewis objected to the “waterishly feminine angels” of popular art, one wonders at first how it is an improvement to portray angels as hardly visible at all. People in the Bible indeed sometimes entertained angels unawares, but that is because the angels appeared as ordinary humans, not as “footsteps of light.” So Lewis is attempting something here other than just trying to get back to biblical pictures of angels. Our best clue to Lewis’s narrative strategy here comes from a letter he wrote to two children who had asked about his eldils. Where most authors might offer a short reply, or none, Lewis gives his young admirers a concise lesson in angelology: “The view that angels have no bodies of any kind has not always been held among Christians. The old idea (early Middle Ages) was that they had bodies of aether as we have bodies of gross matter. The opposite view (your one) was that of the great scholastics—Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, etc. . . . Of course, I just took, for the purposes of a story, the one that seemed most imaginable. I have no scruples about this because, religiously, the question seems to me of no importance. And anyway what do we mean by ‘matter’?”28 This letter indicates that Lewis’s eldils might be hard to see because they have bodies of ether, the lighter-than-air substance that, according to the medieval model, filled the spaces between the heavenly spheres. RECOVERING THE IMAGE OF A MEDIEVAL COSMOS To those who know Lewis’s cultural criticism, it is not at all surprising that he would draw his imaginative picture of angels from medieval literature

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and philosophy. Lewis was a renowned medieval and Renaissance scholar who didn’t believe in the Renaissance. When he was first invited to give a series of lectures on the subject at Cambridge, he thought of calling his lectures “Absence of the Renaissance.” For an alternate title he considered, “What was happening while the Renaissance was not taking place.”29 To a distinguished fellow scholar, Douglas Bush of Harvard University, Lewis defined the Renaissance as “an imaginary entity responsible for anything a modern writer approves of in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.”30 Of course, Lewis knew there was an era called the Renaissance by later generations, a time of revived interest in Greek and Latin texts, expanding scientific knowledge, and increasing secularization. But he considered the term Renaissance, “rebirth,” a gross overstatement, as a “dead” civilization does not produce classics of Arthurian romance, a poetic genius such as Dante, or cathedrals such as those at Chartres and Canterbury. Lewis’s whole person was drawn to a time when Western civilization could, with some accuracy, be called Christendom and when a predominant literary form was an epic romance. The world of Aquinas and of King Arthur, of Boethius and Beowulf, was the world in which Lewis the scholar, the Christian, and the lover of heroic adventure could feel most at home. In books such as The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image, Lewis devoted a great deal of his energy and expertise as a scholar to the task of rehabilitating the medieval worldview, urging his readers to recognize the intellectual and artistic achievements of writers who might otherwise have been considered mainly as forerunners. For example, he reiterated in several published works that medieval authors knew the earth to be a globe and that they thought of it as a very small point in comparison to the vastness of the universe.31 (One of the authors whom Lewis faulted for perpetuating the myth of medieval ignorance on these matters was J. B. S. Haldane.32 ) In writing the Ransom trilogy, Lewis’s task was not to argue for the intellectual vitality of the medieval worldview, but rather to show its imaginative beauty. In all three books of the Ransom trilogy, Lewis includes a wealth of details to suggest what the medieval vision of reality might have felt like from “inside.” As already seen, Ransom’s first journey out of our world invites readers to reenvision dark, empty “Space” as radiant, golden “Heavens.” He used the fantasy genre not to depict the universe as understood in our century but to recreate imaginatively the medieval cosmology, a vast and magnificent picture that Lewis called “the greatest work of art the Middle Ages produced.” 33 Descriptive passages in all three books of the “Space Trilogy” frequently parallel Lewis’s remarks about medieval cosmology in his scholarly works. For example, his essay “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages” is intended as an introduction to the medieval world picture but serves equally well as a

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gloss on Out of the Silent Planet. In this essay he explains that when people in the Middle Ages gazed up at a night sky, they did not think of the spaces they looked at as silent, dark, or empty.34 He also discusses the medieval understanding of “influences”35 and quotes a few lines from Milton’s Comus, the same passage that Ransom recalled when he first looked out and saw the glorious of the empyrean heavens (p. 53). In The Discarded Image Lewis again underscores the differences between the ancients’ picture of the heavens and our perception of outer space. He quotes the Latin poet Lucan, who envisions celestial realms bathed in light: “How dark, compared with the aether, our terrestrial day is.”36 He also contrasts the medieval and the modern in language similar to the passage from Out of the Silent Planet quoted above: “Nothing is more deeply impressed on the cosmic imaginings of a modern than the idea that the heavenly bodies move in a pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity. It was not so in the Medieval Model.”37 Apart from re-imagining “space” according to the medieval model, Lewis also redefines the planets that float in space. When Ransom and his abductors approach Malacandra, they experience nausea, headaches, and heart palpitations (p. 38). At first one may consider this merely Lewis’s (fairly accurate) predictions about the physiological effects of moving from a weightless state back into a gravity field. But soon it becomes clear that he has something more in mind. As the spacecraft descends, Ransom again finds his former conceptions reversed. He feels as if “the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down” and that golden splendor of the heavens are giving way to “a pallid, cheerless and pitiable grey.” Their spacecraft, which had been “a chariot gliding in the fields of heaven” suddenly felt like a cramped steel box “falling out of the heaven, into a world.” After that first descent, the narrator explains, Ransom ever after “saw the planets—the ‘earths’ he had called them in his thought—as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven—excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness” (pp. 39–40). In general, Lewis presents life on Malacandra as very positive, even utopian, so many readers are puzzled to find him describing Ransom’s entry into this world in such negative terms. The passage quoted above seems neither “scientific” nor thematically congruent with the rest of the book. Yet again the explanation can be found in Lewis’s own discussion of medieval cosmology. In The Discarded Image, he explains the hierarchy of created substance developed by the fifth-century author Macrobius: ether, the purest and most limpid form, rose the highest; beneath it came air, less pure and more heavy; then came water, and finally solids. As Lewis sums up: “Finally out of the whole tumult of matter all that was irreclaimable (vastum) was scraped off and cleansed from the (other) elements (ex defaecatis abrasum elementis) and sank down

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and settled at the lowest point, plunged in binding and unending cold. Earth is in fact the ‘offscourings of creation,’ the cosmic dustbin.”38 According to this order of creation, any planet, even an “unfallen” one, cannot match the glory and splendor of the heavens themselves. Yet if one must inhabit a world, Malacandra turns out to be a very good choice. Weston and Devine, thinking they have come to offer Ransom as a human sacrifice to the inhabitants of Malacandra, have severely misunderstood the beings they have encountered there. Once Ransom escapes his abductors and meets the three rational species on the planet—the hrossa, the seroni, and the pfifltriggi—he discovers what he had least been expecting: a utopian society. In fact, Out of the Silent Planet has been interpreted both as an answer to Plato’s Republic and as an answer to Wells’s utopian novels. Writers of utopian fiction generally present societies where the author’s own cherished ideals have been successfully implemented. Lewis is no exception to this rule: the Malacandrian society he portrays as so attractive is a relatively simple society of hunter/poets, shepherd/philosophers, and artisans. As Ransom comes to know the inhabitants of that world, he learns their ideas about love, art, and spirituality—ideas usually similar to Lewis’s own opinions on these subjects. Malacandrian society is also hierarchical, even theocratic, as well as pre-industrial, and pre-capitalistic. In short, it approaches the medieval ideal of a well-governed Christian society. For example, when Ransom recounts the sordid history of earth to a gathering of sorns, they interpret our planet’s woes in terms of a breakdown in the Great Chain of Being: “There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil” (p. 102). (This formulation may be translated to mean that beasts must be ruled by rational species, rational species by angels, and angels by God.) In A Preface to Paradise Lost Lewis argues that “the Hierarchical conception” dominated Western conceptions of order—cosmic, political, and moral— from Aristotle to Milton. With God at the top of the great chain and unformed matter at the bottom, everyone and everything had a natural station, ruling over those below, obeying those above. A great many sins, according to this conception, derive from not recognizing one’s station, and thus perverting the natural order. In Lewis’s reading of Milton, Lucifer sins by rebelling against his natural superiors, while Adam sins by not ruling over his natural subject, Eve. It is not hard to see that Lewis had a great deal of imaginative sympathy for this view of the cosmic order. In the Ransom trilogy, he pictures a cosmos ordered hierarchically, with only “the silent planet,” earth, out of harmony with the natural order. Lewis was pragmatic enough to advocate democracy for the contemporary world, not because people are good enough to deserve it, but because they are so prone to abuse power that it needs to be spread

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out.39 Nonetheless, democracy seemed to him, like so much else about the contemporary world, prosaic and utilitarian, compared to the grandeur and elegance of earlier eras. Having woven medieval motifs into Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis reveals at the end of the story that his own work as a medievalist led him to discover the extraordinary adventures of Elwin Ransom on Malacandra. In chapter twentytwo, Lewis says that he will dispense with literary conventions, drop the mask, and tell his real purpose for writing the book (p. 152). In claiming to abandon the mask of fiction, Lewis thus offers his readers an even more ingenious fiction than the one they have been reading. At this point, Lewis the author becomes a character in his own story. He explains that he learned of Ransom’s voyage after writing to him about the curious word Oyarses, which Lewis had run across in the work of Bernardus Silvestris, a twelfth-century Platonist. Another scholar, identified only as C. J., had interpreted the term as a corruption of ousiarches, a ruler of a heavenly sphere, or tutelary spirit of a planet. Ransom replied to Lewis’s query by inviting him to come over for the weekend, so Ransom could relate his adventures on Malacandra. He felt compelled to do so to convince Lewis that Oyarsa was not just a philological oddity, but an actual being, a powerful one, known to the ancients but now forgotten on “the silent planet.” Ransom convinces Lewis to write up Ransom’s cosmic voyage in the form of fiction, arguing that it would be more advantageous to appeal to readers’ imaginations than to attack their intellectual presuppositions directly. Ransom explains to the narrator that “what we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a changeover from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a start.”

INFLUENCES, MODELS, AND ECHOES As a medievalist by training, Lewis was accustomed to reading authors who were highly syncretistic, blending classical elements with contemporary, Christian with pagan, and historical with fanciful. By temperament he was also something of an intellectual jackdaw, who took whatever ideas attracted him and “Lewisified” them. In Out of the Silent Planet, as in all of Lewis’s fiction, a simple phrase or image may become a kind of literary shorthand for a wealth of emotional associations or a body of ideas. Lewis’s discovery of “science fiction,” as usually understood, came in his schoolboy years, with his reading of H. G. Wells. Though he retained a lifelong interest in Wells, his opinion of the novelist-turned-philosopher was always

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mixed. At the age of fifteen, for example, Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves, “When one has set aside the rubbish that H. G. Wells always puts in, there remains a great deal of original, thoughtful, and suggestive work in it.”40 In another letter to Greeves four years later, Lewis admitted somewhat sheepishly that he had enjoyed reading Wells’s novel Marriage, adding, “One thing you can say for the man is that he really is interested in all the big, outside questions.”41 Of Wells’s transition from science fiction writer to socialist philosopher, Lewis lamented that Wells had traded his birthright for a “pot of message.”42 Yet Lewis acknowledged his debt to Wells, and when reading Out of the Silent Planet, one is often struck by its similarities to First Men in the Moon. Both stories portray a single-minded physicist who builds a spherical spaceship in his backyard, accompanied by a younger man seeking interplanetary gold; both ships make use of an arcane antigravity device; both mention the tinkling sound of meteorites on the ship’s hull and the steel shutters used to shut out the intense sunlight; both show earthlings full of fears about alien worlds who, in an audience before the ruling spirit, discover that they themselves are the ones who pose a danger to other species.43 Despite these structural similarities, however, Out of the Silent Planet is fundamentally anti-Wellsian. In Surprised by Joy Lewis explains that his own trilogy was less a tribute to earlier science fiction than it was an exorcism of a certain coarse fascination, tinged with eroticism, which he found in the cosmic voyage narratives he had devoured in his school years.44 He comments as well that his reading of H. G. Wells planted firmly in his boyish imagination “the vastness and cold of space, the littleness of Man.”45 This is, of course, the materialist myth that Lewis deliberately seeks to subvert in the trilogy. While writers like Wells, Stapledon, and Haldane provided the matter that Lewis wanted to respond to in Out of the Silent Planet, David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus showed him the method for writing what he called “theologised science fiction.”46 Lindsay published a series of novels in the 1920s that reached a very small audience; in fact, he would probably be all but forgotten today if Lewis had not praised him “as the real father of my planet books.”47 Lewis wrote to the American scholar Charles A. Brady that Voyage first gave him “the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal.”48 He explained more fully to his friend Ruth Fitter: “From Lindsay I first learned what other planets in fiction are really good for; for spiritual adventures. Only they can satisfy the craving which sends our imaginations off the earth. Or putting it another way, in him I first saw the terrific results produced by the union of two kinds of fiction hitherto kept apart; the Novalis, G. MacDonald, James Stephens sort and the H. G. Wells, Jules Verne sort. My debt to him is very great.”49

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Such high praise has encouraged some readers of Lewis to turn to Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, hoping to find there the inventive and adventurous plot of Wells and Verne blended with the otherworldliness and spirituality of Morris and MacDonald. Instead they are likely to find a rather repellent and awkwardly structured tale in which the quest for truth and goodness ends only in a maze of illusions and a sense that good and evil are one and the same. Lewis himself was not at all attracted to the theme of Voyage to Arcturus. In fact, he pronounced the book “on the borderline of the diabolical . . . [and] so manichean as to be almost satanic.”50 Yet Lindsay proved that the cosmic voyage could be more than just an adventure story; it could become a vehicle for serious philosophical exploration. Lewis praised the novel for its “lived dialectic,” the way its twists and turns in plot reflect successive attempts to arrive at some final truth, each one to be undercut by some new development in the story.51 Throughout Voyage to Arcturus, the inner lives of the story’s characters are also revealed by their outer shapes. For example, when Maskull, the protagonist, first awakens on Tormance, a planet circling Arcturus, he discovers that his body has been changed; there is a protuberance on his forehead, a lump on his neck beneath each ear, and a tentacle growing out of his chest. Soon he learns that these seeming disfigurements are actually new organs—to give him powers of telepathy, empathy, and magnanimity that he lacked on earth. Thus Lindsay uses the fantasy convention of alien creatures with exotic anatomies to depict, perhaps a bit heavy-handedly, his characters and theme. The feature of Voyage that made the deepest impression on Lewis was Lindsay’s creation of plausible physical details that are also imbued with psychological and spiritual significance. Another writer whose influence is most apparent in Out of the Silent Planet is Jonathan Swift. Ransom’s encounter with the ideal community of the hrossa and his interview with the Oyarsa bear a number of similarities to Gulliver’s experiences in part four of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms.” The word hross is Old Norse for “horse,” and the persistent initial h in the hrossa’s speech reminds us as well of the neighing speech of Swift’s creations. Jeannette Hume Lutton has best summarized the structural similarities between the two stories: Both [protagonists] find themselves in fantastic surroundings as the result of treachery and violence at the hands of their fellow men. Both, wandering friendless and unprovisioned in a totally unknown environment, encounter rational beings whom they initially take to be beasts. Both recognize the rationality of these creatures by hearing them talk. Both go home with the creatures they have met, live for a considerable time among them, learn their language, communicate something of the cultures they

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represent to their hosts . . . and learn something of the host culture, grow to love and admire their hosts but eventually find themselves under the necessity of leaving them, and after further adventures, return to their own lands with changed outlook and a kind of permanent homesickness for the culture that once seemed so alien.52

To this overall summary one can add incidental parallels such as the surprise of the alien creatures when they discover that the protagonist’s clothes are not part of his natural covering and their disgust when they hear the sorry history of our own species. In a conversation with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis, Lewis agreed that a modern-day Swift would probably send his Gulliver to some other planet, a position that has encouraged readers to look for Swiftian touches in Out of the Silent Planet.53 Apart from speculating about literary sources for the first book of the Ransom trilogy, critics have also shown a great deal of interest in possible real life models for the main characters in the story. As mentioned above, the character of Ransom seems to be largely created in the image of his maker. Some scholars, though, have compared Ransom to Tolkien, whose specialty was languages. However, Tolkien did not think Ransom was modeled on himself, though he saw in Ransom some of his own ideas “Lewisified.”54 And Lewis explained that he made Ransom a philologist because the plot would require someone who could acquire new languages quickly.55 There has been a wealth of speculation by Lewis’s critics and biographers about possible sources for the characters of Devine and Weston. J. B. S. Haldane is most often named as the model for Weston. Certainly, some of Weston’s ideas in Out of the Silent Planet sound like Haldane’s sentiments in Possible Worlds, especially the defense of research on animals and the vision of our species reaching out to fill the galaxy. But Haldane’s books show a healthy appreciation for the arts and the humanities, which one cannot picture him dismissing, like Weston, as “unscientific foolery” (p. 13). Lewis himself said that Weston is a composite,56 and the books of the trilogy bear him out on this. In this book and in Perelandra, Weston’s speeches strongly echo not only Haldane but also Stapledon, Wells, Shaw, Bergson, and other proponents of Evolutionism. Note, for example, the closing words of Weston’s speech to the Oyarsa: “What lies in the future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond” (p. 137). This sentence reminds us of the passage quoted above from Haldane’s “Man’s Destiny,” but the closing words are also nearly identical to those found in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1921): “It is enough that there is a beyond.” Devine is probably also a composite, though he is most often associated with T. D. (“Harry”) Weldon, a philosophy tutor at Lewis’s college at Oxford and his nemesis. Weldon was a progressive and a free thinker, and he and

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Lewis took opposite sides, not only in philosophical matters, but also in the college’s political affrays. At some points their relationship became so strained that they were barely on speaking terms.57 If Weldon really were the model for Devine, then Lewis’s satire here is especially pointed; he gives Weldon’s nickname, Harry, to the half-witted boy whom Devine tries to kidnap before deciding to take Ransom instead. Critic William Empson described C. S. Lewis as the best-read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.58 Several who knew Lewis recall that if they quoted a line from Paradise Lost, he could begin quoting the succeeding lines from memory. In conversation or in his writing, Lewis could call to mind a passage he had seen that week or something he had read in school decades earlier. Thus in Out of the Silent Planet, we find interwoven with the story line not only ideas and allusions from classical mythology and the Bible, but also echoes from medieval and Renaissance writers, from Icelandic myth, from science fiction, and romance, or from people and experience in Lewis’s own life. Even a cursory review of Lewis’s creative synthesis in Out of the Silent Planet reveals the kind of literary art Lewis valued most highly in other writers and underscores his own literary art in shaping such a wide variety of allusions into a coherent narrative. NOTES 1. Donald E. Glover, C. S. Lewis and the Art of Enchantment (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), 38. 2. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 29. 3. Ibid., 32–34. 4. Walter Hooper and Warren H. Lewis. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Revised edition (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993), 262. 5. John S. Kennedy, “Fiction in Focus,” Sign 23 (November 1943), 255. 6. Frank Swinnerton, “Our Planet and Others,” Observer 27 (November 1938), 6. 7. C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 71. 8. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965), 71. 9. Hooper and Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 262. 10. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1988), 302. 11. Quoted in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, ed. J. M. Cohen and M. J. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1980), 290.

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12. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children, ed. Lyle Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 32. 13. J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds (New York: Hugh and Brothers, 1928), 305. 14. Charles Moorman, The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1966), 109. 15. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 7. All references hereafter will be incorporated into the text. 16. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 179. 17. Hooper and Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 446. 18. Verlyn Flieger, “The Sound of Silence: Language and Experience in Out of the Silent Planet,” in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 52. 19. W. D. Norwood, Jr., “The Neo-Medieval Novels of C. S. Lewis,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1965, 36. 20. Joe R. Christopher, C. S. Lewis (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1987), 93. 21. Evan K. Gibson, C. S. Lewis: Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction (Washington, DC: Christian University Press, 1980), 40. 22. Hooper and Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 476. 23. Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 34. 24. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children, 70. 25. C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 12–13. 26. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 75. 27. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 69. 28. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children, 73. 29. Hooper and Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 246. 30. Ibid., 475. 31. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 2; Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 50; Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 46–47. 32. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 97. 33. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 62. 34. Ibid., 52. 35. Ibid., 56. 36. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 33. 37. Ibid., 111. 38. Ibid., 62–63. 39. C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harper, 1975), 81. 40. Walter Hooper, ed. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963). (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 49.

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41. Ibid., 264. 42. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 164. 43. Robert E. Boenig, “Lewis’s Time Machine and His Trip to the Moon,” in Mythlore 24 (Summer 1980), 6; Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 135. 44. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 35–36. 45. Ibid., 65. 46. Hooper and Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 444. 47. Quoted. in ed. E. F. Bleiler, “C. S. Lewis,” in Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner’s, 1985), 542. 48. Hooper and Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 375. 49. George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1988), 153 50. Ibid. 51. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, 12. 52. Jeannette Hume Lutton, “The Feast of Reason: Out of the Silent Planet as the Book of Hnau,” in Mythlore 47 (Autumn 1986), 39. 53. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, 143. 54. Glover, C. S. Lewis and the Art of Enchantment, 77; Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 89 55. Glover, C. S. Lewis and the Art of Enchantment, 77. 56. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, 78. 57. Colin Hardie, “A Colleague’s Note on C. S. Lewis,” Inklings—Jahrbuch fur Literatur und Asthetik, 177; Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times, 119; Griffin, Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life, 140; Carpenter, The Inklings, 198. 58. James T. Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan, 1979), xxii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bleiler, E. F., Editor. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 2. New York: Scribner’s, 1985. Boenig, Robert E. “Lewis’s Time Machine and His Trip to the Moon.” Mythlore 24 (Summer 1980): 6. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. ———. ed. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Christopher, Joe R. C. S. Lewis. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1987. Cohen J. M. and M. J. Cohen, eds. The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations. New York: Penguin, 1980.

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Como, James T. C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Downing, David. Planets in Peril. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Flieger, Verlyn. “The Sound of Silence: Language and Experience in Out of the Silent Planet.” In Word and Story in C. S. Lewis. Edited by by Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Gibson, Evan K. C. S. Lewis: Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction. Washington, DC: Christian University Press, 1980. Glover, Donald E. C. S. Lewis and the Art of Enchantment. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965. Griffin, William. Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Hardie, Colin. “A Colleague’s Note on C. S. Lewis.” Inklings—Jahrbuch fur Literatur und Asthetik 3 (1985). Hillegas, Mark R. The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hooper, Walter and Warren H, Lewis. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Revised edition. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993. ———. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963). New York: Macmillan, 1979. Kennedy, John S. “Fiction in Focus,” Sign 23 (November 1943). Kilby, Clyde S. and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1982. Lewis, C. S. Christian Reflections. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973. ———. C. S. Lewis’s Letters to Children. Edited by Lyle Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead. New York: Macmillan, 1985. ———. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. ———. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954 ———. Letters to an American Lady. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. ———. Miracles. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. Of Other Worlds. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harper, 1975. ———. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, 1955.

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Lutton, Jeannette Hume. “The Feast of Reason: Out of the Silent Planet as the Book of Hnau.” Mythlore 47 (Autumn 1986). Moorman, Charles. The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1966. Norwood, W. D., Jr. “The Neo-Medieval Novels of C. S. Lewis.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1965. Samaan, Angele Botros. “C. S. Lewis: The Utopianist and His Critics.” Cairo Studies in English (1966). Sayer, George. Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1988. Schakel, Peter J. and Charles A. Huttar, Editors. Word and Story in C. S. Lewis. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Stapledon, Olaf. Last and First Men. Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1988. Swinnerton, Frank. “Our Planet and Others.” Observer 27 (November 1938).

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3

Perelandra: A Tale of Paradise Retained David C. Downing

Perelandra (1943), the second book of the Ransom trilogy, is the story of “Paradise Retained,”1 of an Eve who is able to resist the tempter long enough for Ransom to destroy him. In fulfilling his quest, Ransom too learns a great deal about the reality of myth and how ordinary mortals may be called upon to engage in mythic labors. Perelandra begins in much the same spirit in which Out of the Silent Planet ends. Again we meet Lewis himself as a character in the novel, this time trudging toward Ransom’s cottage and worrying about getting involved in “inter-planetary politics.”2 “Lewis” muses that Ransom’s discovery of creatures called eldils broke down one’s comfortable distinction between the natural and the supernatural, exposing it as an arbitrary division used to ease “the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us” (p. 11). Lewis uses a number of techniques to break down the distinction between his fictional world and our “factual” world. Most obviously, he uses his own name and those of other real people (“C. J.” in Out of the Silent Planet and “Humphrey” in Perelandra, based upon his friend and personal physician, R. E. “Humphrey” Havard). He also quotes ancient authorities, such as the Bible and a medieval scholar Natvilcius, who assume the reality of angels. He even appeals to human psychology early in Perelandra: “Lewis” learns that the extreme anxiety he experienced in approaching Ransom’s cottage was not

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just a case of the jitters or fear of the unknown; his mind was actually being besieged by bent eldils who wanted him to turn back. Thus the author blurs the distinction between the “psychological” and the “spiritual.” The first theological link between Lewis’s created world and the real world comes in Perelandra when Ransom first tells “Lewis” that he has been commissioned to travel to another planet to engage in some sort of combat with dark forces. To reassure “Lewis” that he has not succumbed to megalomania, Ransom refers to a Bible verse about fighting “principalities and powers” (p. 23). The verse Ransom has in mind is Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (KJV). Ransom correctly notes that the last phrase does not refer to highly placed human rulers, but rather to “hypersomatic beings at great heights” (p. 24). “Hypersomatic” here means “beyond bodily form,” and “great heights” means “in the heavenly world, in the supernatural sphere.” So the dark eldils that Ransom and “Lewis” have to contend with are the same demonic powers with whom the apostle Paul predicted all Christians would have to wrestle. Lewis also blurs the distinction between fact and fiction by supplying Perelandra with a scholarly footnote, which turns out to yet another of Lewis’s inventions. In speculating about how eldils might choose to present themselves to human eyes, “Lewis,” the character in the novel who is a friend of Ransom, quotes an ancient authority, Natvilcius, writing in Latin, about how the actual, celestial bodies of angels might differ a great deal from the way in which they are perceived by human eyes (pp. 18–19). Some Lewis commentators have pored over many a reference source trying to discover the identity of this Natvilcius, apparently not realizing that this medieval theologian is another of the author’s fictions.3 Sometimes when Lewis chose to write anonymously, he used the letters “N. W.” Most of his occasional poems were published with these initials, and the first edition of A Grief Observed appeared with “N. W. Clerk” as its author. “N. W” is short for Nat Whilk, Old English for “I know not whom.” It is the archaic equivalent of the modern phrase “author unknown.” Natvilcius is simply the Latinized form of “Nat Whilk.” Unlike his reference to the actual author, Bernardus Silvestris, in Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis has created here a fictional scholar to introduce his idea that eldils exist on a celestial plane and can be perceived only imperfectly by creatures confined to three-dimensional space. Even Lewis’s little hoax here is an oblique tribute to a medieval author. In his essay “What Chaucer Did to ‘Il Filostrato,’ ” Lewis notes with seeming delight Chaucer’s citation of fanciful sources to lend a greater sense of historicity to Troilus and Cressida.4 After giving instructions to his friend “Lewis,” Ransom prepares himself for another interplanetary adventure, this time a mission to Venus. In his first

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sojourn on another world, the story told in Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom, the pilgrim, made a great deal of progress. But Ransom’s personal pilgrimage is far from over. If the great challenge of Ransom’s first journey was to overcome his fears, the great challenge of his second journey is to overcome his self-will. Though Ransom was taken to Mars against his wishes, he voluntarily accepts a mission to Venus, traveling naked in a translucent coffin-shaped box, and carried through the heavens by the hand of an eldil. If Ransom found Malacandra to be surprisingly beautiful when he first arrived there, he is positively ravished with pleasure upon plummeting into the ocean of the second planet, called Perelandra. With warm sweet-water seas surrounding him and a golden dome of sky above, Ransom finds that even an accidental mouthful of water from a passing wave gives him “quite astonishing pleasure almost like meeting Pleasure itself for the first time” (p. 35). Even the violent squall that rises up leaves him more dazzled than frightened. The thunder is more resonant than terrestrial thunder, making a kind of tinkling sound in the distance, “the laugh, rather than the roar, of heaven” (p. 37). Like Malacandra, with its utopian society of divergent species all living in peace, Perelandra too is an unfallen planet. It is an Edenic world of golden seas and lush tropical islands that float upon the waves. Besides these delights, Perelandra also evokes a whole other species of pleasure. When Ransom, riding on a dolphin’s back at night, approaches one of the floating islands, he experiences a sense of rapture that is somehow strangely familiar, a “cord of longing,” which seems to have been fastened before he ever came to Perelandra, before his earliest childhood, and before even the foundations of the world. For Ransom, this yearning, with both its pain and pleasure, seems “sharp, sweet, wild, and holy, all in one” (pp. 102–103). In this passage we see Perelandra, not only as a garden of unearthly delights, but also as an image of Joy itself. The exotic garden—whether Eden, Hesperides, or Avalon—is one of the places that Lewis associated with Joy from early childhood on. The luxuriant islands, too, appear throughout Lewis’s books, most notably in Pilgrim’s Regress, as a picture of unreachable paradise. But Ransom has not come to Perelandra for his own pleasure. He has been sent on a mission not yet revealed to him. This quest does not begin on a promising note, however: the Green Lady, the Eve of Perelandra, bursts into laughter at Ransom’s appearance the first time she sees him. On the voyage to Venus in a translucent casket, one side of his body has been burnt a brownishred by the sun, and the other side left a pallid white. She apologizes for her first reaction, but nonetheless she dubs him Piebald Man, not a very dignified sobriquet for a man sent to save a planet. Ransom’s two-toned body is an image of his divided self. Though he has submitted to the will of Maleldil (God), he still has within him his natural self, his own desire for control, safety, and self-reliance. Ransom’s

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piebald state recalls his dream in Out of the Silent Planet, in which he found himself straddling a garden wall—half a citizen of a fallen world, half a citizen of Deep Heaven. Critics have applied a variety of psychological models to explain Ransom’s dual nature.5 But Ransom’s inner discord here can best be understood in terms of the traditional Christian paradigms, the conflict between one’s sanctified self and one’s natural self, between the spirit of Christ within and the spirit of the “old Adam” that resists the intrusion. In Out of the Silent Planet Ransom learned a great deal about goodness, especially about diverse creatures living in harmony and their accepting change and mortality as inevitable parts of the life-process. In Perelandra he is forced to confront the nature of evil. As he considers its origins, he comes to realize it is not only “out there,” in rebel angels or demented visionaries like Edward Weston; it is also “in here,” latent within himself and even in the unfallen Eve of another world. He comes to realize that evil may come into a perfect world not because there are positive evils attempting to seduce him but because he is tempted to cling to good things desired over good things given. This truth unfolds itself gradually in Ransom’s mind. Not long after arriving on the planet, he tastes the nectar from a yellow fruit and finds it inexpressibly delicious, a whole new kind of pleasure which, on earth, would lead to wars and the conquest of nations. But as he goes to take a second drink, a vague instinct within tells him not to, that partaking again would be an excess, like demanding to hear the same symphony twice in one day. The next day Ransom finds another exquisite delight when he touches the bubble from a Perelandran bubble-tree and it bursts in his face. He feels the urge to plunge through the whole lot of bubbles to multiply the enchantment tenfold, but again he is restrained by some inner adviser. This time, though, he is able to identify the source of his restraint. He sees that this “itch to have things over again,” is the source of much evil, and that one’s life is not a roll of film that can be unrolled twice. He wonders if the love of money is called the root of all evil because wealth provides “a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again” (p. 48). This lesson, learned from a fruit tree and a bubble-tree, becomes one of the predominant themes of Perelandra. Humans long for a godlike sovereignty over their lives, to maximize pleasure and security, to wall out pain and uncertainty. But only when they learn to accept vicissitudes and vulnerability as inherent to the fabric of life can they truly be free. When Ransom later explains the nature of evil to the Green Lady, the Eve of that world, he amplifies this theme. Though she inhabits a world where everything is good, she herself could become the instrument by which evil enters in. Ransom reminds her that when she first saw him from afar, she thought he was her husband, the Adam of that planet, from whom she had become

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separated. She had been disconcerted for a moment—only a moment—and then adjusted to the new circumstance. But, Ransom asks, what if she had clung to her old expectation, refusing to exchange her hope to find her husband for the novel experience of meeting someone from another world? The Green Lady comprehends this, thinking of times she had gone looking for one kind of fruit and finding another. She says that you would make the fruit you found taste insipid by continuing to long for the one you expected. The Green Lady’s recognition of how evil might enter into her heart applies at the cosmic level as well. Building on her understanding about taking the good that comes instead of clinging to the good one expected, Ransom identifies the Bent One as an eldil who “clung longer—who has been clinging since before the worlds were made.” The Green Lady responds that the old good would cease to be good if one did that, and Ransom agrees: “Yes. It has ceased. And still he clings” (p. 83). The Bent One (Lucifer) was granted one of the greatest of all goods—to be Maleldil’s viceroy over a world. Yet he would accept no sovereign over him, considering equality with Maleldil as a thing to be grasped. And the temptation to which he fell becomes the one he will tempt humans with, to become gods unto themselves. In Genesis, the one thing forbidden to Adam and Eve was to taste fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, to try and achieve a god-like omniscience on their own. On Perelandra, the forbidden thing is to dwell on the Fixed Land, the one continent on their world that does not float upon its golden seas. Maleldil has decreed the floating islands to be the proper home of the king and queen of Perelandra, and he has forbidden them to spend even one night on the Fixed Land. At first thought, this may seem like an odd choice of symbolic “forbidden fruit” on Lewis’s part. Readers may associate a fixed land with absolutes, eternal truths, anchoring oneself in unchanging realities. And floating islands might connote the opposite—relativism, instability, being driven by the caprices of the moment. In the Epistle of James, the doubter is described as being “like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind” (1:6). And in Spenser’s Arthurian allegory Faerie Queene, one of Lewis’s favorite books, the “Wandering Islands” are to be avoided by the righteous. But for Lewis the emphasis is not upon stability versus instability but upon demanding control versus relinquishing it. Throughout Perelandra, the recurring themes are accepting the fruit one is given, riding the wave instead of fighting the current, living on floating islands instead of a stable continent. These images gain added poignancy when we find them again in Lewis’s memoir, Surprised by Joy: “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security.

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It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”6 One rather suspects that Lewis’s doctrine of learning to be carried on the wave rather than craving the fixed land may have been derived in part from his learning to accept the untimely loss of his mother. The Green Lady learns a great deal from her discussions with Ransom, discovering, as she puts it, “I thought I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk in it” (p. 69). In her unfallen state, she has an added advantage. As Lewis had envisioned Adam and Eve before their disobedience, the Green Lady is able to receive new understanding directly from Maleldil into her mind. Even though she has never traveled outside her world, she says she has received mental images of the furry hrossa and gawky sorns of Malacandra, and wishes she could see them with her “outward eyes.” She also knows about the Incarnation on “the silent planet,” earth. When Ransom asks how she could know such things, she answers that Maleldil has told her, or even that he is telling her as she speaks to Ransom. She is a kind of natural mystic, and when she says she is in the presence of Maleldil, even Ransom notices something different about the landscape around them, a sense of fullness in the air, almost a pressure resting on his shoulders. His great task on Malacandra was to overcome his habitual fearfulness; his great task on this planet will be to overcome his habitual willfulness, to acknowledge this pressure as a Presence and to submit to a will greater than his own. When the queen of Perelandra departs, Ransom discovers this sense of Presence is even more overpowering, seeming to squeeze out his very selfhood. Whenever he tries to assert his independence, the very air seems too full to breathe. But as he learns to surrender himself, he discovers it is not really a burden at all, but rather “a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well” (p. 72). As his adventure on Perelandra continues, Ransom alternates between these two moods. When he tries to assert his own will, it seems almost suffocating. But when he gives himself up, it seems a glorious fullness, which makes earthly life, by comparison, seem barren and empty. Evil does not come to Perelandra from either Ransom or the Green Lady. Rather, it arrives from outside, from the fallen planet, in the person of Weston. With the arrival of Weston, the serpent in this Eden, the contest over the Green Lady—and the fate of the planet—greatly intensifies Ransom’s inner strife. Weston’s philosophy has changed somewhat since his misadventures on Malacandra. Rather than the interplanetary imperialism he espoused in Out of the Silent Planet, he now admits of spiritual forces and sees himself as the instrument of some Universal Life Force. Though Ransom tries to warn him— “There are spirits and spirits you know”—Weston arrogantly claims that he is

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both the God and the Devil of Christian mythology, declaring grandiosely, “I call that Force into me completely . . . ” The darkest of all spirits obliges him, causing Weston to lose his selfhood, probably also his life. His body becomes a demonized corpse: the man becomes Un-man (pp. 93, 96). Weston, later the Un-man, plies the Green Lady with arguments for disobeying Maleldil far more subtle than anything the Eve of Genesis had to face. His recurring theme is that staying on the Fixed Land would be only superficially disobedient to Maleldil, and that in asserting a self-will, making herself a “little Maleldil,” she would actually be pleasing him. Try as he might to refute the Un-man’s devious arguments, Ransom fears that he is not up-to-the-job and that the Green Lady will eventually succumb. With the Green Lady and her planet nearing a crisis, Ransom becomes physically and emotionally exhausted. After many long days and nearly sleepless nights (the Un-man doesn’t sleep), he reaches the end of his resources, sitting alone in the dark, in a state very near despair. “This can’t go on,” he thinks to himself repeatedly, as he enters into an internal debate every bit as fierce, protracted, and theologically subtle as any of his contests with the Un-man (p. 130). This dialogue touches upon fundamental questions of Christian theology—free will versus determinism; the seeming absence of God; how a good God could allow evil and suffering in his creation. Throughout this inner debate, one side of Ransom demands some reasonable explanation for this sorry state of affairs, and the other side is willing to trust Maleldil even in the face of seeming failure. His “voluble self ” asks why Maleldil sends no miracle to save this world, why is he absent at such a critical juncture. As an answer, he suddenly senses, “as if the solid darkness about him had spoken with articulate voice,” and that Maleldil is not absent, and that “the darkness was packed quite full.” At that moment one side of Ransom is “prostrated in a hush of fear and love that resembled a kind of death.” But Lewis’s narrator comments that such “inner silence” is difficult to achieve for humans, and that there is an earthbound part of the self that continues to “chatter on even in the holiest of places” (pp. 140–141). When one side of Ransom, listening to the “silence and the darkness,” realizes that he himself is the miracle, the other side replies that it is all nonsense, and that he, “with his ridiculous piebald body and his ten times defeated arguments—what sort of miracle was that?” Why allow the fate of a world to hinge upon the decisions of this “man of straw?” (pp. 141–142). Eventually, it occurs to Ransom that his mission might not be to outargue Weston, but to destroy the “managed corpse” being animated by a devil (p. 122). At first he considers it ridiculous to “degrade spiritual warfare to the condition of mere mythology” (p. 143). But then he recognizes that the earthly distinction between myth and fact is a result of the Fall, and that the

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Incarnation brought the two together again, a historical event which enacted the great myth of the Dying God who lays down his life to redeem his people. Ransom’s “voluble self ” revolts at the idea of physical combat with the Unman and continues offering up one objection after another. But “the terrible silence” around him begins to seem more and more like a face, the sad face of one waiting for him to exhaust his complaints and evasions. Once his inner rebel is silenced, Ransom assumes he will probably be killed doing battle with a “mechanized corpse” (p. 129). Then he hears a “Voice in the night,” which tells him it, “It is not for nothing you are named Ransom,” adding, “My name also is Ransom” (pp. 147–148). Once he is truly willing to give up his life in obedience, Ransom can hear a Voice, directing and comforting him, where earlier there had only been a fullness in the air, and then a Presence in the darkness, and finally a kind of face. In determining to silence the Un-man once and for all, Ransom is casting his whole force of will toward the side of his divided personality who trusts in Maleldil. Once this decision is made, Ransom finds a peace he had not yet known on this planet. On the morning he awakens resolved to do battle with the Un-man, he discovers that the piebaldness of his body has largely faded away. In the end Ransom succeeds in overcoming both his fears and his inner divisions. As he approaches physical combat with the Un-man, Ransom does not expect Maleldil to forestall this encounter or to supply him with supernatural powers to overcome his diabolic enemy. He has simply resolved to do his best in the battle and has no assurance of the outcome. In fact, in the middle of their combat, Ransom shouts a line from the Battle of Maldon. We know from more than one source what Lewis’s favorite line was from this Old English poem about heroic defeat at the hands of the Danes (a sort of Anglo-Saxon version of the Battle of the Alamo). This is assuredly the line Ransom cries in the middle of this battle to the death: “Purpose shall be the firmer, heart the keener, courage shall be the more, as our might lessens.”7 This is quite stirring and heroic—and quite unlike Ransom. Earlier in the trilogy, his temperamental habit in times of stress has been to feel betrayed by those who should have helped him. But Ransom has found a strange new courage. When he first confronts the Un-man, offering to do physical battle, the demon corpse taunts him, playing upon his worst fears, conjuring up images of martyrs “screaming recantations too late in the middle of the fire, mouldering in concentration camps, writhing under saws, jibbering in mad-houses, or nailed on to crosses” (p. 153). The Ransom we have seen earlier in the trilogy might have been paralyzed by so many appalling images of annihilation and abandonment. But he stands firm in the fray and fights with unfaltering determination. Perhaps the secret of his steely resolution lies in his hearing again, quoted from memory by one

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who had been there, those words from the cross: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (p. 153). In his letters, Lewis used Christ’s sense of abandonment on the cross as an illustration to those who felt abandoned: “The Father was not really absent from the Son when He said ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ You see God Himself, as man, submitted to man’s sense of being abandoned.”8 In his battle with the Un-man, Ransom imitates Christ’s passion, setting aside fears and feelings of abandonment to complete the task given to him. The Un-Man proves to be no stronger than an ordinary human of Weston’s size and build; but it is seemingly a good deal harder to kill. After several vicious rounds of boxing, wrestling, and clawing on one of the floating islands, there is a long sea chase and a descent into a subterranean cave. The two become separated in the dark and Ransom climbs up a sheer rockface, until he discovers a fiery underground cavern. There the Un-man accosts him one last time, filling Ransom with sudden fear. Wondering if somehow the Un-man is able to manipulate his thoughts, Ransom cries in a rage, “Get out of my brain. It isn’t yours, I tell you!” (p. 181). Then, invoking the Trinity, he hurls a stone at the Un-man and does away with him once and for all. After this long-sought victory, Ransom climbs some more until he finds a passage to the surface, reemerging on top of a high mountain, a place of brilliant flowers and singing voices in the air. There he rests beside a pool for several days, trying to regain his strength and recover from his wounds. His back is shredded as if he has been scourged, but his most serious wound is on his heel. The culminating fight scene is quite a bit more prolonged than most readers expect, taking up almost a fifth of the novel. Obviously, Lewis has more in mind than just dispatching the villain of his story. As the story reaches its climax, it seems less about external combat and more about divisions in the inner world of Ransom’s consciousness. In this section, Weston, or what is left of him, seems a kind of anti-self of Ransom, a projection of Ransom’s own doubts and misgivings. Several times a pathetic Weston-esque voice emanates from the Un-man, not at all the pompous, unfeeling scientist, but a frightened, petulant whine uttering gibberish about fears and petty grievances stretching back to boyhood. Ransom never knows if this is a diabolical trick from the one who absorbed Weston’s personhood or if it is the actual residue of Weston’s decaying psyche. But the fearful, egocentric babblings of the Weston-voice seem uncommonly like a demented version of the complaints Ransom has been hearing from his own “voluble self ”—the demand for an explanation, the self-pity, the tireless ego asserting its rights. Thus the protracted fight scene is less about hand-to-hand combat than it is about Ransom’s ultimate conquest of Self. In destroying the Un-man,

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Ransom is defeating as well that side of himself that might have prevented him from accomplishing his mission on Perelandra. The fact that this last confrontation occurs in a maze of underground caverns certainly reinforces one’s sense that the conflict is to be seen, at one level, as a battle within the deeper reaches of the mind. THE MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN BACKDROP OF PERELANDRA Though Lewis supplies his protagonist with depth-psychology in the second novel of the Ransom trilogy, his exploration of the human mind is not drawn from modern or post-Freudian sources; rather he reaches back to medieval cosmology and spiritual allegory. Readers familiar with Dante, for example, will recognize frequent parallels between the final cantos of the Purgatorio and the fight scene in Perelandra. At the age of eighteen, long before he became a Christian, the young Lewis pronounced the final quarter of the Purgatorio to be the “heart of the whole book.”9 And this is the section Lewis would later draw upon so freely in the final quarter of Perelandra. In the culminating scenes of Dante’s book, the narrator climbs a steep slope, fearfully crosses through a wall of fire, and emerges outside upon the Garden of Earthly Delights, an unspoiled Eden. There he hears angelic voices, regales his eyes in dazzling flowers, and bathes in the waters of healing and forgetfulness. Only after that final stage of purification on what he calls the Holy Mountain (“santo monte”) is Dante ready to move on to his vision of Paradise. In Dante’s understanding, Purgatory is not a place of punishment, but of cleansing. Lewis’s frequent borrowings from Dante, in this and the following scene, certainly underscore the idea that the last quarter of the novel is less about Weston’s defeat than about Ransom’s progress in his souljourney. Of course, Ransom’s wounded heel and the Un-man’s crushed head remind us also of the Bible, the redeemer promised in Genesis 3:15 who will atone for Adam’s sin by crushing the serpent’s head after being wounded by him. Indeed, Ransom’s adventure on Perelandra offers a number of parallels with Christ’s mission on earth. He enters a world in order to fulfill God’s purpose for it; he is tempted to give up his mission; he undergoes a kind of Gethsemane of anxiety and loneliness the night before he must suffer; he experiences a symbolic death and rebirth in being dragged below the surface and spending three days there; he reemerges to have his mission celebrated by others; and finally he returns to his former sphere. To a reader who asked if Ransom was meant as an allegorical representation of Christ, Lewis replied that Ransom played the role of Christ on that world, not in an allegorical sense, but because in fact all Christians must in their calling play the role of Christ.

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The final section of Perelandra is even more symbolic than the fight scene, and the closing pages of the book contain a mystical vision as vivid and compelling as anything in Dante. Impelled by some inner guide, Ransom descends from the mountain and climbs an even steeper one, called the Holy Mountain. He sees an angel with a flaming sword, like the one who guarded Eden, but knows he is not meant to turn back. He feels by then that climbing has become “not a process, but a state, and in that state of life he was content.” He feels no weariness in his ascent, and wonders if he might be on some “trans-mortal journey” (p. 192). Finally, he reaches the summit and meets the archangels of Malacandra and Perelandra, who take the form of darting pillars filled with eyes, then great slow-rolling wheels, and finally gigantic human forms, like the gods Mars and Venus. Next Ransom witnesses the coronation of the King and Queen of that planet, and hears an angelic litany on the wondrous and ineffable qualities of Maleldil. Eventually, the sounds turn to sights, and he sees the Great Dance of the cosmos as a kaleidoscopic circle of incandescent images (much like the Inviolate Rose in Dante’s Paradiso.) Finally, his mission accomplished, Ransom bids farewell to the newly enthroned King and Queen and begins his journey through the Heavens back to earth. The culminating scene of the novel contains a great deal of mystical theology expressed in poetic language and imagery. The Holy Mountain, the angel with a flaming sword, and the seraphim—all eyes and wheels—may all be found in the Purgatorio. (Both Dante and Lewis acknowledged that their descriptions of seraphim drew directly upon the book of Ezekiel.10 ) Lewis’s visionary creations resemble Dante’s not only in their theology, but also in their social order. Like the unfallen society on Malacandra, ruled by Oyarsa, Perelandra is a hierarchical world, ruled by a single king and queen. Though these are the first pair, the Adam and Eve of that world as yet without descendants, they rule the animals and will eventually have authority over the Oyarsa of this world as well. Ransom is confused by this seeming reversal of the cosmic order, but the queen explains to him that their world was created after Maleldil the Younger had taken human form. As unfallen humans, the king and queen need have no authorities between themselves and Maleldil. Though it might seem grievous for eldils to serve those whom they once ruled, the queen explains that it is “their glory and their joy” to nurture creatures before whom they would later bow (pp. 82–83). Later the Oyarsa of Perelandra confirms this, saying that her relationship with the royal pair is like that of two Perelandran creatures, the dumb dam who suckles the singing beast: “The [singing beasts] have no milk and always what they bring forth is suckled by the she-beast of another kind. She is great and beautiful and dumb, and till the young singing beast is weaned it is among her whelps and is

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subject to her. But when it is grown it becomes the most delicate and glorious of all beasts and goes from her. And she wonders at its song” (p. 196). In this passage Lewis suggests that a hierarchical social order entails more complex relationships than usually understood in our era, when the only political models we are familiar with are democratic, autocratic, or totalitarian. Lewis often referred to the metaphor of the dance, both as an image of harmonic social order and as a picture of the cosmic order. In Miracles he explains that hierarchy itself is more like a dance than a pyramid, with the highest sometimes bowing low and the lowest often raised up. Lewis calls the principle of descent and reascent “the very formula of reality.”11 God had to descend into human form in order to redeem humanity; Christ had to descend into earth and then reascend three days later in order to complete his atoning work; humans must likewise descend into earth before they are raised up again on some final day. In this context, it is interesting to recall that Ransom is carried to Perelandra in a casket, which descends and then reascends upon plunging into the seas of Perelandra (p. 34). Later, when he is dragged downward to the ocean’s depths by the Un-man, the language describing his descent (pp. 171–172) is intriguingly similar to the language Lewis uses in Miracles, in which he compares the Incarnation to the descent and reascent of a deep-sea diver.12 Behind Lewis’s principle of ascent and reascent and his metaphors taken from dancing is the medieval commonplace of the Great Dance. Though we have become accustomed since Newton’s time to think of the universe as essentially a mechanism, the medieval picture was much more festive. Lewis noted in one of his lectures on medieval cosmologists that their symbol for the primum mobile was a young girl dancing and playing a tambourine. He explains that the orderly movements of the heavenly spheres in the medieval picture “are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all of these in one.”13 The Great Dance in the closing pages of Perelandra summarizes a great deal of theology in poetic form, as well as imaginatively recapturing some of the medieval sense of festival, symphony, ritual, and carnival, an intricate equipoise of freedom and order. In the dance, beasts, humans, and spirits all find their place; fallen worlds and unfallen ones, ancient ones and new ones, each participate in the pageant. The dance also serves as a kind of liturgical answer to the angst produced by positivism, the sense that humans inhabit a vast, dead universe that mocks all philosophy, all desire for justice, all yearning for some larger meaning. As Ransom chased the Weston/Un-man overseemingly illimitable seas, he became overwhelmed by “mere bigness and loneliness” and felt that those vast solitudes were haunted, not by some god, but by “the wholly inscrutable to which man and his life remained eternally

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irrelevant” (p. 164). Thinking of the even vaster solitudes of space, Ransom was oppressed by what he calls the Empirical Bogey, “the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere byproduct of essential disorder” (p. 164). Once Ransom caught up with the Un-man, the Weston-voice echoed many of Ransom’s own anxieties about some fundamental meaninglessness at the core of things (pp. 167–169). At the time Ransom had nothing to recommend except to repent and offer a child’s prayer. But the Great Dance offers a whole different cosmic picture. One speaker in the ritual affirms that Maleldil’s greatness does not reside in “years to years in lumpish aggregations, or miles to miles and galaxies to galaxies”; for all of him dwells in the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped, yet “Deep Heaven is inside Him who is inside the seed and does not distend Him” (pp. 214–215). Another voice explains that in the Great Dance all is at the center, whether the dust or beasts or hnau species or gods, for “where Maleldil is, there is the center” (p. 216). A third voice, most directly addressing the Empirical Bogey, proclaims, “All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. . . . There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre” (p. 218). The exclamations heard during the Great Dance frequently echo declarations by mystical writers whom Lewis knew well. Bonaventure (1217–1274) maintained that “God is in all, and all is in God. His center is everywhere, and his circumference nowhere.” Jacob Boehme (1575–1604) wrote that if you conceive a circle “as small as a grain of mustard seed, yet the heart of God is wholly and perfectly therein.” And for those born in God, he said, “the whole Heart of God is undivided.” And John Ruysbroek (1293–1381) spoke of the “unplumbed Abyss of God.”14 If the Great Dance tableau of Perelandra is mystical, so is Ransom’s response to it. As he watches, everything in the cosmos, from a momentary spark to the lifespan of a star, shines out as a circle of swirling ribbons of interwoven light. The vision becomes three-dimensional, then four-dimensional, and continues adding dimension upon dimension, until “the part of him which could reason and remember dropped farther and farther behind the part of him which saw.” Finally Ransom’s vision reaches a “zenith of complexity” that melds into an utter “simplicity beyond all comprehension,” which draws him “with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness.” At the end of his vision Ransom is caught up into “a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness” that stands “farthest from our ordinary mode of being” (pp. 219–222). Feeling utterly free of encumbrances and contradictions, Ransom suddenly has a sensation of awakening. He wonders if it is still morning, but discovers

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he has actually been enraptured for one whole year on Venus, time enough for the planet to complete its circle around the sun and stand again where it stood when his vision began. After such an enthralling vision, there is little more to be said. As Ransom lies down in his coffin-shaped spacecraft, he receives a fitting benediction from the newly crowned king of Perelandra: “The splendour, the love, and the strength be upon you” (p. 222). LITERARY ECHOES IN PERELANDRA Besides the book of Genesis and Dante’s Divine Comedy, Perelandra also draws upon John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and several more recent writers. Lewis probably first got the idea for Perelandra while working on his Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). Margaret P. Hannay has shown that Lewis retained in Perelandra the elements of Paradise Lost that he most admired, while altering the elements he found fault with in Milton. Lewis considered Milton’s Satan to be too impressive in the early books, so he made the tempter of the Green Lady entirely contemptible; he thought that Milton was mistaken in trying to portray God directly, so that Maleldil is only an elusive but powerful presence on Perelandra; he thought that Milton erred in trying to show human sexuality before the Fall, so he keeps the king and queen apart for most of the story; finally he rewrites the ending so that a second Fall may be averted.15 Apart from its broad narrative outlines, Perelandra is indebted to Paradise Lost for a great many details of characterization and setting. For instance, Lewis approved of the regal demeanor with which Milton invested the first pair,16 and he heightens this element in his Eden story. Also, the Green Lady’s momentary disappointment when she sees Ransom and recognizes that it is not her husband (p. 68) parallels Eve’s initial disappointment when she first sees Adam and does not consider him as fair as her own reflection in a pool.17 And when the Un-man scorns Ransom and boasts that he is of a much higher order of creation than the human (p. 119), he echoes the fallen Satan contemptuously telling the angels who guard Eve that once they were no peers of his.18 The other masterpiece of English poetry whose influence is most apparent in Perelandra is Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The descriptions of the floating islands as paradisal gardens recall the Garden of Adonis (bk. 3), and Lewis’s depiction of the dragon and tree with golden apples closely resembles Spenser’s Hesperides. As noted above, however, Lewis’s floating islands reverse the moral valence of Spenser’s Wandering Islands (bk. 3), which are unsafe places where true knights should not dally. The Faerie Queene may also have provided Lewis with the idea of having people travel through oceans on the backs of dolphins, though that tradition is older than Spenser.

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In Lewis’s lectures on The Faerie Queene, he points out several motifs in the poem that reappear in his own Perelandra. He mentions, for example, medieval and Renaissance speculations that “aquatic elemental spirits” may actually exist, then adds cryptically, “and who knows, perhaps in this as in so many things the ancients knew more than we.”19 Whether or not mermen and mermaids exist in the earth’s oceans, they do in Perelandra’s (pp. 161–162). Lewis also mentions the Renaissance love of literary pageants as found in Spenser,20 and then he presents a splendid modern specimen in the Great Dance sequence at the end of Perelandra. Lastly, it is interesting to note that Lewis interprets the episode in which Florimell is held captive in a dark cave (bk. 3) as “very like an allegory of the descent of the soul into material embodiment.”21 As mentioned above, Lewis’s description of Ransom’s descent into the subterranean cavern in Perelandra is intriguingly similar to his comparison of the Incarnation to a deep-sea diver in Miracles. Lewis’s reading of Florimell’s captivity suggests that the image in both books is derived from Spenser. Lewis’s borrowing from more recent writers cannot be demonstrated with any certainty. Lewis’s biographers Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper suggest that the idea of floating islands on Venus may have come from a phrase in Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men about “great floating islands of vegetable matter.” Donald Glover speculates that the contest between Ransom and Weston over the will of the Green Lady may be rooted in another scene in First and Last Men in which an American emissary and a Chinese emissary compete over a naked native woman from another planet. C. N. Manlove, in his turn, asserts that “without a doubt” Lewis got his image of the island paradise from a little book called Melmoth the Wanderer published in 1820.22 But there are so many pictures of an island paradise for Lewis to draw upon— Hesperides, Avalon, Tirnanog, and others—that readers need not assume his imagination was fed by only one spring. In Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Lewis adapted the general plot outline from H. G. Wells’s First Men in the Moon in order to tell an essentially antiWellsian tale. In Perelandra, Lewis pays a similar backhanded compliment to the man he admired as a speculative writer, but not as a philosopher. The broad narrative structure of Perelandra resembles another novel by H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895). In both stories, the protagonist enlists the help of a friend, vanishes to no one knows where, returns wounded and exhausted with an otherworldly flower, and recounts his adventures to the friend who had helped send him on his voyage. In Wells’s novel, this narrative outline provides the basis of a quasi-Marxist fable about effete bourgeoisie and surly proletariat. In Lewis’s hands, a similar story structure tells a very different tale, one in which the ultimate battles are not economic and political, but rather cosmic and spiritual.

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NOTES 1. The term “paradise retained” comes from Victor M. Hamm, “Mr. Lewis in Perelandra,” Thought 20 (June 1945), 271. 2. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 10. References to Perelandra are hereafter incorporated into the text. 3. Jocelyn Gibb, ed. Light on C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965), 92; Nancy-Lou Patterson, “Anti-Babels: the Images of the Divine Centre in That Hideous Strength,” in Mythcon II Proceedings, ed. Glen GoodKnight (Los Angeles, CA: Mythopoeic Society, 1972), 11. 4. C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 30. 5. See Corbin Scott Carnell, “Ransom in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra as Hero in Transformation: Notes toward a Jungian Reading of the Novel,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 14(2) (Fall 1981), 67–71; Lee D. Rossi, The Politics of Fantasy: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 39. 6. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 21. 7. Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis, 54. 8. C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 36–37. 9. Walter Hooper, ed. Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 1 (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 560. 10. “Descriptions of Seraphim: Dante,” Purgatorio, canto 29; C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 12. 11. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 128–129. 12. Ibid., 116. 13. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 13. 14. “Bonaventure: William R. Inge,” in Christian Mysticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 28; “Boehme, Ruysbroek: Evelyn Underhill,” in Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1911), 100, 229. 15. Peter J. Schakel, ed. The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977), 73. 16. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 119. 17. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 4, 477–491. 18. Ibid., 4, 27–34. 19. C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed., Alistair Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 129. 20. Ibid., 127. 21. Ibid., 126. 22. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 174; Donald E. Glover, C. S. Lewis and the

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Art of Enchantment (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), 77; C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 119.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carnell, Corbin Scott. “Ransom in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra as Hero in Transformation: Notes toward a Jungian Reading of the Novel.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 14(2) (Fall 1981). Downing, David. Planets in Peril. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Gibb, Jocelyn, Editor. Light on C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965. Glover, Donald E. C. S. Lewis and the Art of Enchantment. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981. GoodKnight. Glen. Mythcon II Proceedings. Los Angeles, CA: Mythopoeic Society, 1972. Green Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Hamm, Victor M. “Mr. Lewis in Perelandra.” Thought 20 ( June 1945). Hooper, Walter, Editor. Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 1. London: HarperCollins, 2000. Inge, William R. Christian Mysticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902). Lewis, C. S. Letters to an American Lady. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. ———. Miracles. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. Perelandra. New York: Macmillan, 1968 ———. A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 119. ———. Selected Literary Essays. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. ———. Spenser’s Images of Life. Edited by Alistair Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ———. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, 1955. Patterson, Nancy-Lou. “Anti-Babels: the Images of the Divine Centre in That Hideous Strength.” In Mythcon II Proceedings. Edited by Glen GoodKnight. Los Angeles, CA: Mythopoeic Society, 1972. Rossi, Leo D. The Politics of Fantasy: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984. Schakel, Peter J., Editor. The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. London: Methuen, 1911.

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4

That Hideous Strength: Spiritual Wickedness in High Places David C. Downing

In Perelandra Ransom explained to his friend “Lewis” that a biblical reference to “spiritual wickedness in high places” did not refer to corrupt human rulers, but rather to malign transhuman powers.1 In That Hideous Strength, Ransom and his small company at St. Anne’s are called upon to fight “wickedness in high places” in both senses of the term. They must stop a conspiracy by the totalitarian technocrats at the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) at Belbury. But they must always thwart an attempt by bent eldils to take control of planet earth. The third book of the Ransom trilogy represents the culmination of what might be termed the “Infernal Period” in Lewis’s writings. In four consecutive books Lewis introduces hellish characters and hellish settings (imaginatively recast for modern readers) in order to explore the psychology of faith and doubt, of temptation and spiritual trial. In 1942 The Screwtape Letters appeared, featuring advice from a senior devil in the “lowerarchy” to a junior tempter. In 1943 came Perelandra, where Ransom spends half the story contending with a demonized corpse. In 1945 That Hideous Strength appeared, as well as The Great Divorce, a fantasy about denizens of hell who take an excursion to the outskirts of heaven, most finding reasons to prefer their nether abode. Rooted as he was in traditional Christian doctrine and convinced of the theological soundness of much of the medieval worldview, Lewis believed in

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the reality of malevolent spirits opposed to God. But in the books mentioned above, the literal existence of the diabolical beings is secondary to their usefulness as metaphors of human vice and folly. Lewis believed that every moral choice humans make moves them one step closer to heaven or to hell; in fact, hell and heaven did not represent for him God’s judgment so much as God’s acknowledgment of the pattern of choices people make throughout their lifetimes. Lewis summed up his position best in The Great Divorce: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.”2 The villains in Lewis’s fantasies are not hard to find; they do not, as St. Paul warned, cloak themselves as angels of light. Lewis’s bad characters range from the merely pompous to the outright demonic, but they share a few common traits: they set aside ordinary morality in favor of utility or in favor of some lofty, abstract goals for humanity; they disregard the sanctity of life, whether human or animal; they are “progressive” and find little value in history, tradition, or the classics; they prefer the scientific, artificial, and industrial over the simple and natural; they use language to conceal and distort reality, rather than to reveal it. In his preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis calls it “‘a tall story’ about deviltry,” adding that it “has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in The Abolition of Man.”3 Lewis goes on to explain that he created the tale partly in response to some disturbing notions he had encountered in talking to a scientific colleague and later in the works of Olaf Stapledon. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), with its doctrine of humanity’s sacred obligation to scatter its seed among other worlds, provided the impetus for Lewis to start writing the Ransom trilogy in the first place. In That Hideous Strength Lewis goes beyond Out of the Silent Planet in trying to expose the fallacies and dangers in the philosophy of what he called “Westonism.” By the time Lewis composed the third book of the trilogy, he had read Stapledon’s other well-known novel, Star Maker (1937), which surveys the entire history of the cosmos and suggests that some sort of god, or creative principle, is evolving amid the galaxies. Writing to Arthur C. Clarke in 1943, Lewis described the ending of Stapledon’s novel as “sheer devil worship.”4 The protagonists of That Hideous Strength are Mark and Jane Studdock, a pair of anchorless modern intellectuals in an unfulfilling marriage, who undergo diametrically opposite pilgrimages as the story unfolds. As Mark works his way through the “wheels within wheels” at the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), readers find there too a progression from scientific pragmatism, to evolutionism, to “sheer devil worship.” At the lowest level are functionaries like Busby and Curry, who think the purpose of

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N.I.C.E. is to provide centralized organization for scientific research. Busby calls N.I.C.E. “the first attempt to take applied science seriously from the national point of view” (p. 37), while Curry burbles about putting “science itself on a scientific basis” (p. 38). Lord Feverstone (Devine) laughs at these simpleminded marionettes and explains the goals of N.I.C.E. to Mark in Westonesque terms: to continue interplanetary expansion; to rid the planet of species that compete with humans for resources; and to purify the human species itself, through “sterilization of the unfit [and] liquidation of backward races” (p. 42). (The parallels between the animating ideas of N.I.C.E. and those of Nazism would certainly not be lost on the novel’s original readers in 1945.) Even more radical than Feverstone are those at N.I.C.E., like Filostrato, who want to dispense with organic life altogether, retaining only Mind (p. 173), and Straik, who offers Mark “the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty” (p. 179). Readers who think that Lewis is resorting to caricature tactics here will find similar ideas in J. B. S. Haldane, Olaf Stapledon, and G .B. Shaw and in more recent writers like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. To explain the intellectual climate in which such diverse, and sometimes outr´e, notions could come together, the narrator probes the thoughts of Ransom, who leads the opposition against N. I. C. E.: “The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had . . . begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. . . . Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God” (p. 203). The narrator continues, perhaps with an excess of exposition, explaining why positivists should not be shocked by where their ideas are leading: “What should they find incredible, since they no longer believed in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?” (p. 203). Looking back after nearly a half century, it seems ironic that Lewis’s apprehensions would be more fully realized in his own discipline, in the study of literary texts, than in the sciences. The work of Thomas Kuhn and others concerning the subjectivity of the scientific paradigms seems to have been more warmly received by scholars in the humanities than by scientists themselves. Perhaps the trait that most unites poststructuralist approaches to literature is a “despair of objective truth” and a “concentration upon mere power.” As Lewis himself explained, the ideas touched upon in That Hideous Strength are more fully developed in his book-length essay The Abolition of Man. There he makes the case for objective moral values and objective

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aesthetic values. Lewis begins by taking to task the writers of an elementary textbook who teach that when one calls a waterfall sublime, one is actually saying, “This waterfall induces sublime feelings in me.” Sublimity, according to them, is a label for an emotional state; it is not anything in nature but something imputed by human minds upon the environment. Lewis argues that such an approach reduces all value judgments to mere expressions of emotion, largely irrelevant in serious discussion.5 Against this climate of relativism and imputed value, Lewis harkens back to the traditional model: “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it-believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.”6 Lewis quotes Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Augustine, and others to show that traditionally moral education has been defined as a process of learning to conform one’s sentiments to the acknowledged pattern of the universe. Though this pattern is assumed by all religious traditions, according to Lewis, he borrows the concept of “the Way,” which he calls the “reality beyond all predicates,” something that exists in itself apart from all subjective human perceptions or interpretations.7 Such analysis is unabashedly essentialist. Depending upon one’s own response to the contemporary climate of postmodernism, The Abolition of Man may seem woefully naive and obsolete, or else it may seem a prescient forewarning of trends that would become much more radical after Lewis’s time. If Lewis could hear current discussions that assume that not only values but also meanings are radically indeterminate, he might sigh, “Apr`es moi, le deluge.” In The Abolition of Man Lewis makes a compelling case that one cannot arrive at value judgments using reason alone. In-between the head (reason) and the belly (the appetites) must come the chest—the seat of magnanimity, of “Sentiment,” of “emotions organized by trained habits into stable sentiments.”8 Lewis calls these “the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.” In fact, he says, these may be the defining trait of humans, for by intellect they are mere spirit and by appetites they are mere animals. Those who deny the reality of sentiment, of objective values, are—in Lewis’s term—“men without chests.”9 In That Hideous Strength virtually all of the technocrats at N.I.C.E. would qualify as people “without chests.” In their disregard for traditional moral norms, for natural beauty, for the suffering of animals and of other humans, they reduce all questions of value to matters of rationality, utility, or selfinterest. They dismiss any ethical qualms about what they are doing with grandiose abstractions about the advancement of the species (p. 258), or else they dismiss such qualms as meaningless biochemical events (p. 296).

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In Lewis’s mind, such attitudes can lead ultimately to destruction, of the innocent, of the environment, and ultimately of themselves. MARK STUDDOCK’S DANTESQUE DESCENT Elwin Ransom’s encounters with evil in the first two books of the trilogy provide the context for understanding the people at N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength. N.I.C.E. represents the values of Edward Weston and Dick Devine writ large. Weston is revered at N.I.C.E. as a great scientist murdered on one of his interplanetary travels, and Devine reappears as Lord Feverstone (a rather infernal title). The dreamer and the schemer have spawned at N.I.C.E. a whole academy of dreamers and schemers. In his homily “The Inner Ring,” Lewis speaks about people who become scoundrels by degrees, making increasingly serious compromises of their integrity and values in order to make their way into an exclusive circle, then the circle-within-the-circle. Mark Studdock is quite clearly a victim of the inner-ring syndrome as he tries to gain acceptance at N.I.C.E. He is willing to put up with pompous bureaucrats like Busby and Curry just for the pleasure of being an insider in the Progressive Element. Then he is liberated to see Feverstone baiting these two boors and inviting him to join a more elite set of insiders. As he gets more enmeshed in the machinations at N.I.C.E., Mark finds it harder and harder to tell who really is on the inside and who is just a “mascot.” Even Filostrato, who dismisses almost everyone else at Belbury as canaglia (plebians), is not a true insider; he knows about the living head at N.I.C.E., but he does not know—until too late—that it is not his science that keeps the head alive. In “The Inner Ring” Lewis warns that trying to penetrate all the inner circles is like peeling an onion.10 In the center there is nothing. Mark’s attempted ascent up the organizational ladder is actually a descent into hell. The many references to the inner rings, inner circles, and wheelswithin-wheels make plain Mark’s inner-ring syndrome. However, these allusions also reveal a less obvious subtext: Mark’s experiences at N.I.C.E. closely parallel Dante’s trek through the Inferno. The Divine Comedy was never very far from Lewis’s mind. He first read the poem, in Dante’s medieval Italian, during his midteens, while studying with Kirkpatrick. He read and reread Dante’s masterwork for the rest of his life, often praising it in his letters. According to George Sayer, Lewis considered Dante the most sublime of all poets and judged the “Paradiso” to be the greatest poetic achievement in European literature.11 Lewis borrowed freely from the “Purgatorio” and the “Paradiso” in the closing chapters of Perelandra; in That Hideous Strength, he drew just as heavily on the “Inferno.”

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Throughout the third novel of the Ransom trilogy, the conversation of the people at N.I.C.E. is peppered with hellish rhetoric. In the sections of That Hideous Strength devoted to Bracton and Belbury, there are nearly eighty phrases such as “raise hell,” “the devil of a stink,” “I’m damned,” “these infernal college politics,” “what in the blazes,” and so forth. These sections also contain more specific Dantean echoes. In describing Wither, the deputy director of N.I.C.E., as one of those “souls who have lost the intellectual good” (p. 213), Lewis is translating from “The Inferno”: “c’hanno perduto il ben delFintelletto” (pp. 3, 18).12 Later when Wither impassively looks upon his own death and perdition (p. 353), the narrator comments, “So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way,” taken directly from canto i, lines 11–12. In general, there is a close correlation between Mark’s increasing entanglement in the affairs of N.I.C.E. and Dante’s journey through the circles of hell, guided by the poet Virgil. The narrator of “The Inferno” (designated here as Dante, for convenience) begins his passage at the vestibule of hell, where he sees the opportunists, those who served neither good nor evil, but only themselves. The first person from Bracton College who appears in That Hideous Strength is Curry, the officious subwarden. Feverstone describes Curry as “a man who loves business and wire-pulling for their own sake and doesn’t really ask what it’s all about” (p. 40). Curry is not necessarily evil; he is just someone who thrives on college politics. Accordingly, when the great conflagration comes to Belbury at the end of the story, Curry is the only one associated with N.I.C.E. who survives. The first circle of the inferno is Limbo, the abode of virtuous pagans. There Dante meets the great poets and philosophers who lived before the time of Christ and so could not benefit from his atoning work. Curry mentions to Mark early on that there will be resistance to the plans of N.I.C.E. from the likes of Hingest (a true research scientist), Glossop (a classics scholar), and Jewel (the college canon). These men are not directly allied with Ransom and the followers of Maleldil, but neither will they be any part of N.I.C.E. When Jewel tries to argue at the faculty meeting against the sale of Bragdon Wood, he is so feeble and so upset that his voice is barely audible, and Feverstone mocks him into silence (p. 28). This may allude to the virtuous pagans in circle one who speak with muted voices (pp. 4, 114). In the second circle, Dante encounters those who sinned through carnal desire. In the next section of That Hideous Strength, after the one in which Jewel is humiliated, Jane is asked by Mrs. Dimble about her sex life and then bursts into tears (p. 30). We have already learned from the opening pages of the novel that Mark pays little attention to Jane; when he comes to bed, he has little to say to her, and only one thing can keep him awake—and that not for long (p. 14). Later, when Mark gradually comes to see the emptiness

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and squalor of his life, he feels that somehow he has violated his wife, made her the object of his lust, not his companion in love (pp. 247, 381). It would seem that Mark himself best exemplifies the carnal sinner. In the third circle are the gluttons, those who overindulge in food and drink. In the next section of That Hideous Strength, Mark has dinner with Feverstone and Busby in the Curry’s rooms. Busby is described as “busily engaged in eating” during the conversation, and he has to wipe his beard before speaking up (p. 36). Busby is also described as having a third glass of wine, which loosens his tongue and makes him easy prey for the glib Feverstone (p. 37). Mark also enjoys the excellent port being served, and he is “not perfectly sober” when he returns home to Jane that evening (p. 46). Throughout the rest of the story, Lewis emphasizes all the heavy drinking that goes on at N.I.C.E., including Mark’s increased reliance on alcohol. In the fourth circle, Dante witnesses a battle between the avaricious and the prodigals, those who cling too much to material things and those who waste material things. The same kind of conflict arises when Feverstone, the spendthrift, mocks the aspirations of Busby and Curry. Busby, enraptured by the program of N.I.C.E., exclaims upon “the buildings alone, the apparatus alone! . . . Fifteen department directors at fifteen thousand a year each!” (p. 37) When Feverstone offers a mocking reply about “careers for our sons,” Curry takes Busby’s side and rhapsodizes about the Pragmatometer, a device to coordinate all the research activities that will cost half a million (p. 38). Feverstone dismisses all this to Mark as drivel. He is the same Dick Devine he was in Out of the Silent Planet; his only real concern is how he personally can benefit from all this. And we assume he is benefiting when we see him in the next scene driving recklessly in a flashy, big car, taking Mark to N.I.C.E. In the fifth circle of hell are the wrathful and the sullen. And when Mark arrives at Belbury, he is assigned to work with Steele and Cosser, who are both wrathful and sullen. Steele is “a tall, unsmiling man,” who complains that Mark has been unloaded on his department without anyone consulting him (pp. 58–59). At their first meeting, Cosser and Steele talk about Mark as if he is not even there, but later Cosser confides to Mark, while picking his nose, that he hopes to get rid of Steele and take over his position (pp. 85–86). As he continues at N.I.C.E., Mark encounters more and more sinister colleagues. The repulsively obese Professor Filostrato, the sadistic Fairy Hardcastle, and “Mad Parson” Straik make self-important functionaries like Curry and Busby seem almost likable. Straik’s rambling diatribes are loaded with biblical phrases and motifs, but his ideas sound like those of an anti-Christ. He ludicrously misapplies verse after verse from Scripture to advocate violence, coercive collectivism, and extermination of any who resist (pp. 78–80). He certainly parallels those whom Dante finds in the sixth circle of hell—the heretics.

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This pattern continues until the final judgment of everyone at N.I.C.E. In the seventh circle of the inferno are the violent, those who do violence to nature and violence to others. And succeeding pages in That Hideous Strength describe what sounds like a murder outside the Common Room of Bracton (p. 93), Fairy Hardcastle’s arousal when inflicting pain (p. 96), and the noise of animals being tortured in the name of science (p. 102). In the eighth circle are the fraudulent. And in the next section of the novel, Mark discovers that his position at Bracton has been fraudulently taken away from him (pp. 105–106), and Feverstone fraudulently denies any responsibility (p. 111). Mark himself joins in the fraud, writing newspaper editorials that blame Jews, lawyers, and other resisting elements for riots that were engineered by the secret police at N.I.C.E. (pp. 131–134). The ninth circle of hell is reserved for the worst of offenders, those who betray kindred, country, and their faith. Mark has been carnal, gluttonous, greedy, prodigal, and fraudulent. But he stops short of the most serious crimes he might commit in the service of N.I.C.E. The whole reason that Mark was recruited in the first place was not for his work as a sociologist but so that Frost and Wither could get their hands on his wife, to make use of her power of second sight. Not realizing its significance at first, Mark balks at the whole idea of bringing Jane to Belbury: “Her mere presence would have made all the laughter of the Inner Ring sound metallic, unreal; and what he now regarded as common prudence would seem to her, and through her to himself, mere flattery, back-biting and toad-eating” (p. 171). As Wither and the others put increasing pressure on Mark to turn her over to them, his resistance too increases: “For almost the first time in his life a gleam of something like disinterested love came into his mind; he wished he had never married her, never dragged her into this whole outfit of horrors which was, apparently, to be his life” (pp. 185–186). Besides his refusal to betray his wife, Mark also refuses to trample on a cross. It would seem that in the last circle of his own descent, he finally discovers the moral core within himself, which will allow for his escape. The sinners in “The Inferno” are already suffering, but the sinners at N.I.C.E. will receive their punishment all at once. In the closing chapters of That Hideous Strength especially, images from the final cantos of “The Inferno” predominate. When Frost and Wither, the leaders of N.I.C.E. and the two most depraved characters in the story, lock into a bizarre embrace and fall onto the floor, seeming to wrestle without moving (p. 243), they recall the two brothers in “The Inferno” who had quarreled all their lives and are frozen together for eternity in a sheet of ice (pp. 32, 40–60). When Filostrato and Straik are both decapitated as a sacrifice to the dark eldils (pp. 354–355), their fate echoes the beheadings and dismemberments of the schismatics and heretics in the ninth circle (canto 38).

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Mark, who found his moral bearings just in time, is spared from the carnage at the end of That Hideous Strength. Yet his part in the story is also related with Dantean images and phrasing. When Mark sees an elephant join in with the other animals venting their rage on their tormentors at the banquet, the elephant is described as standing with “its ears standing stiffly out like the devil’s wings on each side of its head” (p. 349). This image comes directly from “The Inferno”; at the very center of hell sits Satan, frozen in ice, with batlike wings fluttering at the sides of his head (pp. 34, 38–54). As he watches the elephant carelessly trampling people and glorying in the destruction, Mark calls him “the King of the world” (p. 350); this phrase seems less odd when one compares it to Dante’s description of Satan as “the emperor of his sad world” (pp. 34, 28). Mark loses consciousness briefly, but he is told by Merlin to “get up,” to make good his escape (p. 352). The words “get up” are used to translate Virgil’s words—Levati su—when he stirs Dante to shake off his stupor and escape the lowest circle of the inferno (pp. 34, 94). One of the most unforgettably grotesque images in “The Inferno” is that of Lucifer gnawing on the skulls of Brutus and Cassius, betrayers of Caesar, and Judas, betrayer of Christ. The idea that Satan devours the condemned is taken literally—and whimsically—by Lewis in “ Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” where Screwtape is the after-dinner speaker at a banquet of devils feasting on human souls. Used more obliquely in the trilogy, the Dantean image suggests two more traits shared by Lewis’s evil characters: abuse of intellect and self-destruction.13 Dante’s phrase rendered by Lewis as “souls who lose the intellectual good” may be interpreted to mean those who lose the good of intellect or those who do not use intellect for good. Weston and Devine are pronounced only “half hnau” on Malacandra14 because they have their rational faculties but no moral sense. Their science is not tempered by conscience. In the same way, the major figures at N.I.C.E. all abuse their intellects and deny their moral instincts. Wither habitually uses evasive, circumlocutory speech to disguise his true aims and to manipulate others. Frost convinces himself that all moral responses are mere by-products of biochemical processes. Straik takes biblical phrases wildly out of context in order to make them seem to support his violent radicalism and blasphemous deification of humans. All of these who habitually abuse language have their powers of speech taken from them. The epigraph of That Hideous Strength explains that the title of the book is taken from a poem by Sir David Lyndsay describing the tower of Babel. N.I.C.E. is a new Babel, another attempt to marshal human resources to clamber up to heaven, or to bring heaven to earth by main force. In the end, these new Nimrods experience another confusion of tongues and achieve only their own destruction.

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Like Weston in Perelandra, the leaders of N.I.C.E. are destroyed by the forces that they themselves have set into motion. Weston called a force into himself that did indeed come in and take over. Filostrato and Straik would sacrifice human lives so that they may rule as gods, but they end up themselves as human sacrifices. Feverstone, who hopes to subdue the earth, is swallowed up by the earth. Frost, who denies the reality of the passions, is consumed in flames that he ignites himself. The others, who have been destroying animals for trivial causes, are destroyed by liberated animals. In the end, the banquet at Belbury is another devils’ banquet. TWO OPPOSITE PATHS TO REDEMPTION In his supposed organizational ascent that was actually a spiritual descent, Mark Studdock finds himself continually suppressing his natural instincts and his better judgment. He moves from the merely vulgar to the unethical and then to the criminal, but he stops short of sacrificing his wife to the ambitions of his superiors. Placed in the “Objective Room,” a chamber whose proportions and furnishings are designed to subvert his sense of normality, Mark’s instincts carry him in the opposite direction: “That idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him—something which obviously existed quite independently of himself ” (p. 310). Though the narrator declares that Mark’s modern education had provided him with “hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan” (p. 185), he still has an inborn sense of some reality towering above all the reductionistic rhetoric at N.I.C.E. Later, when he is commanded to trample a crucifix, Mark recognizes that he is in mortal danger, but some instinct deeper than self-preservation arises within him. He decides that even if Christianity is a fable and the universe without ultimate meaning, he will side with the Normal over the Perverse, the Straight over the Crooked. Mark refuses to trample on the cross, the first courageous thing he has ever done in his life. This is the beginning of his recovery. Stripped of all other supports and defenses, Mark’s regeneration begins when he discovers that he has nothing left but the Way. Like her husband, Jane Studdock will also be “shaken out of the modest little outfit of contemporary ideas which had hitherto made her portion of wisdom” (p. 150). Mark discovers the Straight by the via negativa, by almost losing himself to the Crooked, the Perverse, and the Bent. Jane moves in

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the opposite direction as she is drawn closer to Ransom’s community at St. Anne’s. Several critics have noted the structural symmetries in That Hideous Strength by which the Studdocks’ opposite pilgrimages are marked. Jane begins with a malaise and lack of commitment, either to her marriage or to her scholarship; Mark begins with a reckless commitment, a headlong plunge to fulfill his ambitions by the shortest route possible. Jane dreams realities and thinks they are illusions; Mark is deluded about the actual workings of Bracton and N.I.C.E., just when he thinks he knows what is really going on. Jane takes a slow train to St. Anne’s, while Mark rushes to Belbury in a big, flashy car driven by the reckless Feverstone. Jane is invited to join St. Anne’s, while Mark is coerced into joining N.I.C.E. The fresh garden at St. Anne’s fills Jane with images of paradise, while the garden at N.I.C.E. is artificial and sterile, like “a municipal cemetery” (p. 101). Jane is filled with ineffable joy when she first meets the head of St. Anne’s—the regal and mystical Ransom, returned from Perelandra. Mark is filled with unspeakable horror and revulsion when he meets the “head” of N.I.C.E—a decapitated head supposedly kept alive by scientific apparatus but actually animated by dark eldils.15 Like Ransom in Out of the Silent Planet, revelations come to Jane bit by bit. First she learns that she is not a neurotic but a clairvoyant, one with the power to dream realities (pp. 64–65). Then she learns, begrudgingly, that she has contributed to her failing marriage as much as her husband (p. 147). Then she discovers that Arthurian legends are truer than she ever could have imagined (p. 176). Eventually, she undergoes a complete paradigm shift. On Malacandra Ransom had gradually come to realize that Maleldil was the same person as the God he already believed in. In That Hideous Strength Jane makes the even more startling discovery that Maleldil is the God she had not believed in, and that the “religion” she had set aside in her youth actually pointed to “alarming and operative realities” (p. 234). MEDIEVALISM ASSOCIATED WITH RANSOM AND HIS COMPANY AT ST. ANNE’S In the first two books of the trilogy, Ransom traveled to other worlds to discover the truth of myth and to find a cosmos more similar to medieval models than to modern ones. In That Hideous Strength Arthurian legends and other medieval traditions prove their relevance, and reality, on twentiethcentury earth. The most prominent Arthurian element in the third novel of the trilogy is the return of Merlin. Bragdon Wood, the ancient garden owned by Bracton College, is the site of Merlin’s Well, the reputed resting place of Arthur’s

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wizard. The leaders at N. I. C. E, those who know its real goals, would like to unearth Merlin and awaken him from his enchanted slumber in order to combine his powers with their own. It might seem highly incongruous to have modern technocrats trying to use magic, but in The Abolition of Man Lewis argues that science and magic spring from the same impulse. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. . . . There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.16

Since Lewis identifies magic not with the Middle Ages but with the humanists who came afterward, one can see why the words magic and magician usually have negative connotations in his writings. Magicians in Lewis’s fiction (see The Magician’s Nephew) and his nonfiction are generally depicted as those who abrogate moral laws in order to gain illicit power over nature and over others. Even in That Hideous Strength Lewis takes pains to distinguish Merlin’s kind of magic, which originated in Atlantis, from Renaissance magic (p. 201). Once Merlin is awakened from fifteen centuries of sleep, he does not unite his powers with N.I.C.E. but joins the humble company at St. Anne’s. Eventually he becomes the instrument by which the conspirators at N.I.C.E. are exterminated. This resolution to the story has troubled some critics. Chad Walsh, for example, complains that Merlin’s role in the story comes close to being a deus ex machine, and that the victory of Ransom and his followers is based upon the lucky circumstance that they found Merlin before the others did.17 But this objection overlooks several key elements in the narrative. First, Merlin does not simply stumble into the hands of the good side. Once he awakens, he is guided by some preternatural means, and he rides directly to St. Anne’s and Ransom. Second, Merlin does not offer his services to whoever asks. He subjects Ransom to three arcane questions that no one at N.I.C.E. could have possibly answered (pp. 272–274). Ransom can speak to these occult matters because he has traveled to other worlds and continues to have contact with lords of other planets. In their conversation, Ransom learns that Merlin, despite his rather druidic appearance, is a Christian—another reason Merlin would never have allied himself with N.I.C.E. Finally, it should be noted that Merlin does not destroy Belbury using his own weapons alone.

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Ransom arranges to have the powers of the Oyarsas channeled into Merlin (p. 317), powers that the leaders of N.I.C.E. could not have drawn upon. Merlin submits to Ransom’s authority, not only because Ransom can answer Merlin’s questions, but also because Ransom is the pendragon. In Arthurian tradition, the pendragon is the head of all the armies in times of war. Though Arthur was only one of many kings in his time, he inherited the title of pendragon from his father, Uther, so he was the chief commander in the wars against the Anglo-Saxons. (Pendragon is from Celtic “head of a dragon,” taken from the dragon’s head pictured on the standard of the one who held the title.) Lewis imagines that the title has been passed down secretly from generation to generation and that it now rests upon the one appointed to lead the battle against a new type of invasion. As pendragon, Ransom is also the head of Logres. From the Welsh word for “England,” Logres traditionally represents the Britain of King Arthur, whose royal court was at Camelot. Though Logres is mentioned in Spenser and Milton with about the same connotations as the word “Camelot,” Lewis’s friend Charles Williams gave the term a more specialized meaning. In his Arthurian books, Williams used Logres to represent the spiritual side of England, the combination of Christian and Celtic ideals, a force that stands against the tides of worldliness and corruption. Lewis’s use of the term “Logres” in That Hideous Strength clearly follows the precedent established by Williams. Besides his title of pendragon, Ransom is also called Mr. Fisher-King. Lewis offers a rather contrived explanation for this, noting that Ransom received a large inheritance from his sister, Mrs. Fisher-King, on the condition that he takes her name (p. 114). Despite this unconvincing detail, the name does add another Arthurian dimension to the story and to Ransom’s role in it. In the matter of Britain, the fisher-king is the keeper of the grail, a fisherman and king wounded in the thighs who holds court at his castle, Carbonek. The knighterrant Percival (or Parsifal) visits the grail castle and finds the fisher-king in pain, reclining on a couch in front of a fire. During dinner Percival sees a bleeding lance and a radiant golden cup but does not ask about them. The next morning he learns that his fateful silence has serious consequences: the fisher-king cannot be healed, and all his lands will be devastated. This is the beginning of Percival’s quest to recover the grail. There are different versions of what happens to Percival. Some versions end happily, some not so. But all present the fisher-king as a wounded godlike figure who is keeper of the grail. Critic Ellen Rawson has shown that Jane Studdock is a new Percival in That Hideous Strength. When Jane first visits Ransom, his chamber seems to her like a throne room, and she finds him reclining in front of a fire with a painful wound, just as the fisher-king appeared to Percival.18 Ransom reminds her of King Arthur and of Solomon, and for the first time since childhood she could

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“taste the word King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power” (p. 143). Percival became a Christian because of his encounter with the fisher-king, who is a Christ-figure in most versions of the grail legend. Jane too discovers spiritual realities at St. Anne’s, coming to suspect that Maleldil is indeed God (p. 234) and finally surrendering her will to Maleldil (pp. 318–319). Besides his roles as pendragon and fisher-king, Ransom embodies other Arthurian elements as well. In answer to one of Merlin’s questions, Ransom explains that King Arthur is not dead but sits in the House of Kings in the land of Abhalljin on Perelandra (p. 274). Later it is revealed that Ransom will be taken to Perelandra to be with Arthur once his work on earth is done. Abhalljin (spelled “Aphallin” later in the text) is taken from the Welsh term Afallon, the abode of dead heroes, and the Celtic version of Elysium. In Arthurian legend this appears as “Avalon,” the mystic isle where Arthur was taken to be healed of his wounds. Since the trilogy suggests that Perelandra was the true source of all myths of paradise, it is only fitting that Avalon should be found there and that Ransom should be healed on the world where he was wounded. At the end of That Hideous Strength Venus herself (the Oyarsa of Perelandra) descends to earth not only to carry Ransom back to her world but also to unite with the other Oyeresu in defeating the dark powers that have gathered at N. I. C. E. Ransom had discovered the reality of planetary “influences” when he traveled through the heavens to Malacandra, though astrology plays only an incidental role in Out of the Silent Planet. But in That Hideous Strength, all of the planetary intelligences meet with Ransom and Merlin, their very proximity making the rest of the company at St. Anne’s successively mercurial, amorous, martial, saturnine, and jovial. This chapter, “The Descent of the Gods,” is a brilliant prose-poem on how planetary influence might be supposed to affect human psyches, but it also sets up the turning point in the story: the passing of their powers into Merlin for the purpose of eradicating N. I. C. E. Astrology is associated with St. Anne’s just as clearly as magic is associated with Belbury. Since Lewis did not approve of magic, one supposes at first that he would not have any imaginative attraction for astrology either. But Lewis explains in his volume of the Oxford History of English Literature that magic and astrology were never allied. While the first occult science sought power over nature, the second assumed nature’s power over humans.19 Lewis also noted that medieval astrologers did not believe that the planets compelled human behavior, only influenced it. The usual view in the Middle Ages, he says, was that a person, assisted by grace, could overcome a bad horoscope just as he or she could overcome a naturally bad temper.20 Apart from Arthurian and astrological elements, another medieval motif that figures prominently in That Hideous Strength is the image of the enclosed

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garden. In the Song of Solomon and other books of the Old Testament, the walled garden is a protected place, associated most often with a woman’s virginity. In the Middle Ages, the walled garden symbol accrued multiple associations. As Lewis explains in The Allegory of Love, the enclosed garden is associated with youth and youthful love in early writers like Andreas Capellanus and Claudius; in Guillaume de Lorris, it includes also the life of the court, the arena for games of love; in later writers it represents allegorically the heart of a woman and the many emotions that reside there. “Deeper than these,” concludes Lewis, “lies the world-wide dream of the happy garden—the island of the Hesperides, the earthly paradise, Tirnanog.”21 This summation is perfectly sound scholarship, but it also reveals the man behind the literary historian. The Garden of the Hesperides is the image of Joy, or Sehnsucht, which Lewis used most often-in Surprised by Joy, in Perelandra, and in his poetry. The phrase “the earthly paradise” is the title of a romance by William Morris, much beloved and often read by Lewis, which cleverly interweaves classical and medieval motifs. Tirnanog, “land of the young ones,” is the Irish equivalent of Avalon. Lewis most likely first heard of Tirnanog from his childhood nurse, Lizzie Endicott, who was full of Irish lore and song. So when Lewis speaks of the deeper meanings of garden imagery, he not only is casting light on the medieval mind but also is revealing his own. In That Hideous Strength the sequestered garden first appears in the narrator’s description of Bragdon Wood, the ancient copse owned by Bracton College and coveted by N. I. C. E. Indulging a bit too much in elaborate description and historical allusion, Lewis conjures up all the rich traditions of the place, going back to British-Roman times (that is, the era of King Arthur). The narrator has a sense that he is penetrating a place holy of holies as he enters Bragdon Wood (p. 20), and this indeed will turn out to be a kind of sacred ground. After this elaborate spell of history and legend has been woven around Bragdon Wood by the narrator, readers cannot miss the irony when in the very next section of the novel, the bureaucrats at Bracton College treat this hallowed ground merely as a pink rectangle on a map, land to put up for sale. While Mark Studdock and his colleagues are discussing what to do with Bragdon Wood, his wife, Jane, encounters another walled garden when she goes to visit Ransom and his little community at St. Anne’s. As she is led toward the house, Jane passes by a vegetable garden and a line of rosebushes that fill her with wistful thoughts about Peter Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland, and The Romance of the Rose. The walled garden at St. Anne’s evokes in Jane all those images of earthly paradise—from children’s stories to medieval romances. The gardens of Peter Rabbit and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are well known. The Romance of the Rose is an allegorical love poem begun in thirteenth-century France by Guillaume de Lorris and continued by Jean

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de Meung. It is discussed at length by Lewis in The Allegory of Love; indeed, Lewis’s monumental work did a great deal to revive interest in the poem. All of these are enchanted gardens that evoke a sense of paradise, suggesting that Jane herself is on the verge of discovering the spiritual home she has been seeking all her life. Jane’s husband, Mark, is transformed by the opposite process, not by approaching the outskirts of heaven, but by losing himself in Dantesque circles of hell. In the closing pages of the novel, once Mark has recovered himself and realized how weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable all his ambitions have been, he discovers also that he really does love his estranged wife. At the same time Mark realizes that his lifelong obsession to be an insider has led him only to “the dry and choking places”; he thinks of Jane as one who has within her “deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled” (p. 247). At the end of the story, Mark contemplates his failure as a husband and lover, and again he conjures up the image of the walled garden and the cloistered rose. He feels he had been a “lout and clown and clod-hopper” treading on sacred ground “where great lovers, knights and poets, would have feared to tread.” He sees himself as someone who trampled over the protecting hedge and plucked the rose “with hot, thumb-like, greedy fingers” (pp. 380–381). Though Mark’s mind is full of self-loathing here, he is actually gaining the humility and selfrecognition needed to redeem him from moral failure. In using so many medieval motifs to describe Mark’s self-condemning thoughts, Lewis suggests that Studdock is developing more humane patterns of thought and feeling. Fortunately for Mark, one of the things that Jane has learned in her time at St. Anne’s is forgiveness. So when Mark and Jane are reunited in a kind of honeymoon cottage, we feel assured that their marriage will be renewed. In a suitably medieval ending, it is Venus herself who bids Mark to go in to his wife and who blesses their marriage bed. NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 2. 2. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Fontana, 1972), 72. 3. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 7. Further references to this work are incorporated in the text. 4. Quoted in Donald E. Glover, C. S. Lewis and the Art of Enchantment (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), 76. 5. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 15. 6. Ibid., 25. 7. Ibid., 28.

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8. Ibid., 34. 9. Ibid. 10. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. 1949. Reprint (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 64. 11. George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1988), 63. 12. Cf. Dante Aligheri, The Inferno. New York: Signet Classics, 2001, trans., John Ciardi. All line references to The Inferno in the text are keyed to this edition. 13. C. S. Lewis, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” in The World’s Last Night (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964). 14. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 81. 15. See Richard Purtill, “That Hideous Strength: A Double Story,” in The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977), 91–98; Margaret P. Hannay, “A Preface to Perelandra” in ed. Peter J. Schakel The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977), 103; Evan K. Gibson, C. S. Lewis: Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction (Washington, D C: Christian University Press, 1980), 72–73. 16. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 86–88. 17. Chad Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 119. 18. Ellen Rawson, “The Fisher King in That Hideous Strength,” in Mythlore 34 (Winter 1983), 30–33. 19. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 6 20. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 55. 21. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 119–120.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Translated by John Ciardi. New York: Signet Classics, 2001. Downing, David. Planets in Peril. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Gibson, Evan K. C. S. Lewis: Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction. Washington, D C: Christian University Press, 1980. Glover, Donald E. C. S. Lewis and the Art of Enchantment. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981. Hannay, Margaret P. “A Preface to Perelandra.” In The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Edited by Peter J. Schakel, Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1977, 91–98.

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Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man.1943. New York: Macmillan, 1973. ———. The Allegory of Love. 1936. Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. ———. English Literature in the 16th Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. ———. The Great Divorce. 1946. Reprint. New York: Fontana, 1972. ———. Perelandra. 1943. Reprint. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” In The World’s Last Night. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964. ———. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. That Hideous Strength. 1945. Reprint. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. 1949. Reprint. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965. Purtill, Richard. “That Hideous Strength: A Double Story.” In The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Edited by Peter J. Schakel. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1977, 91–98. Rawson, Ellen. “The Fisher King in That Hideous Strength.” Mythlore 34 (Winter 1983): 30–33. Sayer, George. Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1988. Schakel, Peter J., Editor. The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1977. Stapledon, Olaf. Last and First Men. Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1988. Walsh, Chad. The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

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The World of Narnia: Medieval Magic and Morality Marvin D. Hinten

THE VIRTUES OF ANIMALS AND INDEPENDENT CHILDREN The best-loved children’s books of all time tend to be part of a series: The Hardy Boys; Nancy Drew; The Three Investigators; The Bobbsey Twins; Little House on the Prairie; Harry Potter; and, of course, The Chronicles of Narnia. When C. S. Lewis began writing what eventually turned into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, however, he had no idea he was working on a series. He simply wanted to write a book with talking animals in it, of the kind he had loved as a child. Lewis grew up with the characters of Beatrix Potter, such as Squirrel Nutkin and (most famous today) Peter Rabbit; he also (later on in life) loved the animal figures in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: Rat, Mole, and Toad. Talking animals allow an author the rights of adulthood without requiring corresponding responsibilities to be shown. In talking animal books, animals own homes, drive cars (if the time frame permits), and fight battles, but one doesn’t see them serve on school boards, punch a time clock, pay taxes, or carry a briefcase. The other successful character element in a children’s book is, of course, children; but child characters work best when they are on their own. The Bobbsey Twins, for instance, repeatedly go on trips (The Bobbsey Twins in the Country, The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore, etc.) to prevent them from having

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to check in constantly with their careful parents. Alice goes through a looking glass and into a wonderland to allow her a chance for individualized adventuring. And the Pevensie children are doubly separated from their parents. Most obviously, the world of Narnia is generally disconnected from our own, so the children need have no concern about whether to phone or telegraph (in our times, e-mail or text message) the folks. But even in our world, the children are separated from their parents in every book. It is noteworthy that Mr. and Mrs. Pevensie do not say a single word in the entire series. Thus the children need not worry about what would doubtless happen in our planet to kids who seriously claimed to have been to another world—being fussed over as sick or hallucinating (in Lewis’s day) or being sent to counseling (in our own time). THE HALTING BEGINNING OF NARNIA Lewis began The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the late 1930s but gave it up, apparently because he couldn’t figure out what to do with it. It would be more accurate to say Lewis began “the book” rather than The Lion, because there was no lion; coming up with the idea of Aslan as a Christ-figure was one of the keys in helping Lewis decide what the series would be. Aslan is the only character to appear in every book, and at least three of the books would not have a plot without his involvement. When the novel was finally completed in the late 1940s Lewis, as was his custom, solicited responses to Lion from his friends, especially those in the Inklings, his weekly reading and conversation group. The responses ran the gamut from delighted, through tepid, to appalled—the last reaction being that of Lewis’s close friend and fellow-writer, J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien disliked the book almost entirely, but he particularly abhorred the mixing of images—the blending of mythology, history, Bible, and literature that is a prime feature of Lewis’s style. The greatest target of Tolkien’s wrath was the appearance of Father Christmas (Santa Claus) in a book featuring a Christ-figure. Had most of his friends reacted in the same way as Tolkien, Lewis might well have never sent the book out for possible publication, and the world of children’s literature would be notably poorer. Fortunately, leveler heads prevailed, and Lewis decided to send the book forth. His publisher suggested making Lion the opening book in a series, and Lewis readily agreed. He decided to stop with seven, despite the fact that many children (and adults) wanted him to continue, for a typically Lewisian reason: seven is the biblical number of completion, so that number of books should complete the series.

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READING ORDER: THE FIRST SHALL BE—SECOND? The original publication order, with date of publication after each title, is as follows: Book 1: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Book 2: Prince Caspian (1951) Book 3: The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952) Book 4: The Silver Chair (1953) Book 5: The Horse and His Boy (1954) Book 6: The Magician’s Nephew (1955) Book 7: The Last Battle (1956)

When the series was taken over by HarperCollins in America in 1994, they changed the order of the books as follows: Book 1: The Magician’s Nephew (hereafter “Nephew”) Book 2: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter “Lion”) Book 3: The Horse and His Boy (hereafter “Horse”) Book 4: Prince Caspian (hereafter “Prince”) Book 5: The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (hereafter “Treader”) Book 6: The Silver Chair (hereafter “Chair”) Book 7: The Last Battle (hereafter “Battle”)

Is one order “better” for reading through the series than the other? It probably doesn’t make much difference how a reader familiar with the series goes through them, and even for a first-time reader the books pretty much each stand on their own (unlike, say, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is more a novel in three volumes than a trilogy). Once having entered Narnia, one is always a Narnian, as the novels suggest. But which is the preferable way to enter Narnia: through Lion or through Nephew? I think there are sound literary, intellectual, and theological reasons for a person’s first acquaintance with Narnia to come through Lion. Literarily, if we read Nephew first, we fail to appreciate the predicament Lewis found himself in upon completing Lion. Lewis, recall, had no original plan of writing a series. When the publisher asked if he could produce more books like Lion, Lewis’s first thought, naturally enough, was to tell how Narnia got started. But he couldn’t tell it—because he didn’t know! Why was there a gas lamppost, an object not invented until the nineteenth century, in the

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medieval world of Narnia? Why was the wardrobe magical? Why did the land have some animals that talked and some that didn’t? This is why Nephew appeared so late in the original publication order; Lewis wrote other books while he tried to solve the mysteries of Narnia, and it was not until finishing up the series with Battle that he was able to have all the pieces of Narnia’s creation in place. Intellectually, reading Nephew first causes the professor’s emphasis on logic in Lion (“what do they teach them in the schools these days?”) to seem a cheap stunt. The professor doesn’t need to use logic to determine that Lucy could be telling the truth about visiting a magical world: he’s been to one himself! Suppose one of my students were to ask how many sites I thought would come up if they Googled C. S. Lewis, and I answered, “Use logic. There are about 500,000,000 native speakers of English in the world, and there would probably be about one site for every hundred speakers, so you can estimate 5,000,000.” The student’s amazement at my powers of logic would be great—unless she discovered that I had already checked on the number of sites earlier in the week! Theologically, reading Nephew first gives us a very indirect approach to Aslan’s importance in the history of Narnia. As Dr. Bruce Edwards sagely notes in the preface to Further Up and Further In,1 his study of Lion, where is a more logical place to begin a potential convert and new reader of the Bible: Genesis or the Gospels? Just as one would not ordinarily take a potential new Christian through Genesis before introducing them to the sacrifice of Christ, it would seem a new Narnian needs to see the love of Aslan before witnessing his creativity. For all of these reasons, Lion is the place to first meet with Aslan. THE THEMES OF NARNIA The Narnian books are clearly part of a series, in that they all take place in the same world, and one character in that world (Aslan) appears in each of the books. (Trivia question for Narnia buffs: Aslan aside, who is the only character to appear in five of the seven books? To give you a chance to ponder, the answer will be found later in this chapter.) Although the books make up a series, each one is self-contained, with its own underlying thematic emphasis. Those themes can be presented as follows: BOOK The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Prince Caspian The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” The Silver Chair

THEME Death and Resurrection Faith Renewal Scripture

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Humility Creation End Times

It will be seen that this displays a fairly full picture of spiritual life. I do not suggest at all that Lewis determined, “I’m going to write a book emphasizing the importance of holding onto faith.” Instead, this chart indicates that Lewis undergirded his children’s adventure series with Christian meaning and that each book has a particular aspect of Christianity that runs through the book as an underlying motif. With that in mind, this section covers the themes that are brought forth in each of the novels. Death and Resurrection in Lion If the key element of Christianity is the death and resurrection of Christ, then Lion is the key to understanding the Chronicles, as I have noted above. Aslan doesn’t just die; he is sacrificed on behalf of Edmund as a redemptive act, just as Christ was sacrificed on behalf of the sins of humanity in our world. And Aslan undergoes a bodily resurrection just as Christ did. We should not push these parallels too far; unlike Christ, Aslan sacrifices himself on behalf of one person alone, and unlike Christ, Aslan comes back to life within twentyfour hours of his murder. These sorts of disparities may be part of what Lewis meant when he repeatedly argued that his stories are not allegories; we should not expect to find every detail a match. On the other hand, lack of matching details should not dissuade us from recognizing clear spiritual parallels. Aslan is clearly intended to be like Christ in another world; in fact, Lewis would go further and say Aslan is Christ in another world. But Aslan’s is not the only death and resurrection portrayed in Lion. The witch turns numerous creatures to stone in the book, and they are in effect dead until rescued by the breath of Aslan, when they return to the land of the living. (I have called Aslan a Christ-figure, and he is; but the repeated references to his breath in the series show that in some ways Aslan resembles the Holy Spirit as well, since the Greek word pneuma refers to both breath and spirit.) Edmund’s spiritual death, while less overt than the physical death undergone by the others, is also followed by a renewing spiritual resurrection. Faith in Caspian In my edition of Lion,2 the children first meet Aslan on page 122. From that point until the end of the book, Aslan is present in fifty-two pages out of sixty-five, or 80 percent of the work. Although the children are warned by

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Mr. Beaver that Aslan comes and goes, certainly the reader has no sense of that in the opening work of the series. The years without Aslan, while the children rule Narnia, slip by in a few pages; and in reality, we actually don’t know that those years are without Aslan. Perhaps he reappears from time to time without any authorial comment. But Caspian is a different story, thematically as well as literally. In my edition of Caspian, the children spend 212 pages in Narnia, but Aslan appears on only forty-two of those pages, or a bit under 20 percent. It’s a sharp contrast; once the children meet Aslan, they have 80 percent of the Lion pages with him, but only 20 percent of the Caspian pages. Even more disconcerting, on the pages where Aslan does appear, not everyone can see or hear him. So the children have to have faith in their memories of previous experiences with Aslan, and they have to have faith in an Aslan who seems to have changed his method of operation. II Corinthians 5:7 says that Christians “walk by faith, not by sight” (all biblical references: King James Version), and in their nighttime journey through the forest the children have to do this literally. But it’s not just Aslan that the children have to exhibit faith in; they also need faith in Lucy. In deciding which way to go, Edmund points out that Lucy was trustworthy in the past; therefore “[W]ouldn’t it be fair to believe her this time?”3 Faith is “the evidence of things not seen,” as Hebrews 11:1 observes, but it is still evidence; the past is not seen, but it still can serve as evidence, just as the Bible does for Christians in our world. Finally, Caspian, the title character of the book, has to exhibit faith in order to initiate the entire process; without his faith in the old stories leading him to blow Susan’s horn, he can receive no help for Narnia. If Susan’s horn represents a prayerful call for help, faith is the impetus that causes one to use it. Renewal in Treader Treader is the most sacramental of the Chronicles, with clear references to both baptism and communion. The baptism scene, in which Eustace is “undragoned,” is justly famous, filled with spiritual insight. II Corinthians 5:17 says that becoming a Christian makes a person a “new creature,” and here Eustace literally becomes a different creature. But it’s not entirely a new creature; he has been a boy before, and now his boyhood is renewed. Yet at the same time he is new in nature, so both newness and renewal operate together, here and throughout the book. On the island of the Duffers, for instance, becoming visible again renews their former state; yet being given the new name of Dufflepuds symbolizes their new condition of happiness, discovering how they can use the water for recreation and transportation.

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The other sacrament, communion (Eucharist) appears near the end of the book at the island of the three sleepers. The place where they have fallen asleep is called Aslan’s Table, or as we would call it in our world, the Lord’s Table, where the Lord’s Supper is observed. As Ramandu’s daughter notes, the food there is “renewed, every day.”4 Scripture in Chair Just as Edmund Pevensie (answer to earlier trivia question) is a unique character by appearing in five Chronicles (Lion, Caspian, Treader, Horse, and Battle), Jill Pole is unique in being the only person from our world for whom Aslan is the first character she sees upon her entrance to Narnia. (For some characters, Aslan may be the first Narnian they see, but they are accompanied by other people from our world whom they see first.) Aslan gives Jill four Signs to remember and believe, indicating that the ease of her mission will depend upon her ability to use and recognize them, just as the words of Scripture are repeatedly proclaimed as a lamp to the believer’s feet and a light to his path, to use the language of Psalm 119:105. Reaffirming the importance of these instructions, Aslan says to her about the Signs, “Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night.”5 For biblically literate readers this is reminiscent of Deuteronomy 6:7, where the Israelites are told to “talk of them [God’s words] . . . when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” Aslan’s emphasis on memorizing the Signs parallels the previous verse in Deuteronomy, where the Jewish people are told to have God’s words “in thine heart.” Humility in Horse Lewis, like most traditional Christian writers, considered pride the chief sin to war against. Dante’s Inferno, for example, is arranged by order of how wicked each of the Seven Deadly Sins is, and pride is found at the very bottom. The list of characters in Horse needing to learn humility is long. Even minor characters, such as Lasaraleen, are filled with pride; her assertions that the Tisroc is “dear” and “kind” to her and that he invites Lasaraleen and her family to his palace “almost every day”6 are belied by her later terror at the nearness of the Tisroc. Aravis takes offense at Bree’s initial conversations with Hwin and has to be told that horses are as important as people among Narnians. Rabadash learns humility by being turned into a donkey, in an episode reminiscent of the humiliation of Nebuchadnezzar in the biblical book of Daniel.

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But the chief character needing baptism in humility is the magnificently portrayed warhorse Bree. Lewis brilliantly shows his insecurities and pride to be bound up together, as his assertions of superiority and expressions of contempt keep mixing in with requests for reassurance. (Upon learning that rolling in the grass looks funny, he wants to know whether he has acted improperly from Shasta, who is of all people least likely to know.) His peak of arrogance is reached when he tells Hwin (“crushingly,” according to Lewis) that “I know a little more about campaigns and forced marches and what a horse can stand than you do.”7 But at the end, having lost his conceit, Bree becomes, in the Hermit’s words, a “very decent sort of Horse.”8 Creation in Nephew Creation is clearly the main motif in Nephew, as it is the book about how Narnia was created. We also find out along the way that numerous other worlds exist, which presumably also have been created by Aslan, and we see the beginnings of knowledge and evil as well. Because Nephew is, in effect, a creation myth, Lewis brings in elements of Greek, Norse, and Hebrew creation accounts. In addition, since this book contains a fall, he makes full use of Paradise Lost in showing how temptation begins its work. Nephew is the most allusive of all the Chronicles. End Times in Battle The very first paragraph of Battle says it is a book about the “last days” of Narnia, and of course that is a phrase used repeatedly in the New Testament to signify end times, as in II Peter 3:3 and James 5:3. Perhaps particularly apropos is II Timothy 3:1, which indicates that “in the last days perilous times shall come.” Certainly that is the case for Narnia. Lewis, very aware of medieval numerology, felt that once a series of books goes past a trilogy, for symbolic fitness the series needs to end with either a ninth book (Trinity times three, as in the nine orders of angels) or, most fittingly, a seventh book, the biblical number of completion. CHARACTERISTICS OF LEWIS’S STYLE All authors have a style, a collection of characteristics that distinguishes their writing from other writers of their era, and Lewis’s style is more distinguishable than most. Some of the chief elements of his style are presented and exemplified in this section.

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Biography (EXAMPLE) When they had measured the attic they had to get a pencil and do a sum. They both got different answers to it at first, and even when they agreed I am not sure they got it right.9

Most authors permit their personal characteristics and values to show through their works, and this is certainly true of Lewis. Despite his mother holding a college degree in mathematics, Lewis himself always struggled with figures, even with simple addition and subtraction, so while his nine- and ten-year-old characters display a precocious knowledge of Milton and Bronte, they wrestle with basic arithmetic. Authorial Intrusions (EXAMPLE) Bree was not in the least trying to leave Shasta out of things, though Shasta sometimes nearly thought he was. People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them, and if you’re there you can hardly help feeling that you’re out of it.10

Twentieth-century authors often try to stand aside and let the novel proceed on its own, but this was not the case for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British authors, who generally provide commentary on the action. The ancient Roman writer Horace, in Ars Poetica, had said that good writing should both delight and instruct, and older authors followed his dictum faithfully, with the plot being the primary vehicle for delight, and the commentary providing part of the instruction. In any split between modernists and traditionalists, Lewis always favors tradition, so it’s no surprise that in the Chronicles he works in avuncular insights from time to time, even to the extent of repeatedly noting in Lion that the reader should be careful about wardrobe doors! Humor (EXAMPLE) “I tell you it is an animal,” said the Bulldog. “Smell it for yourself.” “Smelling isn’t everything,” said the Elephant. “Why,” said the Bulldog, “if a fellow can’t trust his nose what is he to trust?” “Well, his brains perhaps,” she replied mildly. “I object to that remark very strongly,” said the Bulldog.11

Lewis is exceptionally clever in matching animals with their supposed characteristics in folklore; the elephant who “never forgets” elevates brainpower,

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while the bulldog tenaciously defends the power of smell. Somehow a dispute between a bulldog and an elephant is funnier than the same dispute between humans; to sense this, I will show you what the dialogue above would lose if it were presented as being between two people, with “see” substituted for “smell” and “eyes” substituted for “nose.” “I tell you it is an animal,” said Bill. “See it for yourself.” “Seeing isn’t everything,” said Elizabeth. “Why,” said Bill, “if a fellow can’t trust his eyes what is he to trust?” “Well, his brains perhaps,” Elizabeth replied mildly. “I object to that remark very strongly,” said Bill.

Notice how much the exchange loses if the same conversation is engaged in by people rather than animals. When people are asked why they read The Chronicles of Narnia, they often forget to mention the wit. I have heard two of the Chronicles read aloud in groups of a dozen or so adults and was surprised by how frequently people laughed audibly at touches of Lewisian humor. Pro-Maturity, and Anti-“Grownupness” (EXAMPLE) “Oh Susan!” said Jill, “she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grownup.”12

Every religious book Lewis ever wrote was designed to encourage spiritual and emotional maturity, but he always distinguished maturity from acting “grownup.” For Lewis, the difference appears to have meant being unable to appreciate the interests of others—children, animals, and other types of people. He had no patience with men who could talk only about “manly” subjects—engines and sports—or women who could talk only of fashion and cosmetics. Similarly, he felt that a person should never “outgrow” children’s books, but should simply add an appreciation for good adult literature to an appreciation for good children’s literature. For Lewis, “growing up” involved shrinking interests and awareness; maturity involved expansion. Fascination with Language (EXAMPLE) Prince Caspian lived with . . . his aunt, who had red hair and was called Queen Prunaprismia.13

Lewis loved words—their origins, meanings, alterations, and sounds. One of his books, Studies in Words, focuses entirely on how selected words began,

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changed, and expanded. In keeping with this interest, the Chronicles have numerous examples of rare and coined words, and particularly Lewis liked to play with names. “Prunaprismia” is a coined name designed to guide the reader toward an instant dislike of the character. The name is a blended combination of “prunes” (a food Lewis loathed) and “prissy,” meaning overly feminized. As noted above, Lewis had no respect for prissy women. In addition, the combination is meant to remind literary readers of Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit, in which young ladies are taught to repeat the words “prunes” and “prism” as a way of developing well-rounded lips; in fact, the forty-third chapter of the book is entitled “Prunes and Prisms.” It is entirely characteristic of Lewis to combine linguistics, literature, and autobiography in creating a character’s name. Intriguing Characters (EXAMPLE) “I’m trying to catch a few eels to make an eel stew for our dinner,” said Puddleglum. “Though I shouldn’t wonder if I didn’t get any. And you won’t like them much if I do.”14

We read novels for many reasons—plot, theme, and style—but certainly one reason is character; if an author can create characters that we care about and find interesting, we are more likely to read to the end and to search out other books by that author. Many readers fall in love with Lewis’s Narnian characters, especially the nonhuman ones. In my own case, for example, our family hamster was affectionately named Reepiceep after the valiant mouse of the series. People generally do not want to live in the real world with a constant pessimist, one who finds the dark cloud behind every silver lining, but we like to read about them (note the similarity of Puddleglum to Eeyore in the Pooh books), particularly when at bottom they are good-hearted and loyal. Moral Teaching (EXAMPLE) “Rotten?” said Uncle Andrew with a puzzled look. “Oh, I see. You mean that little boys ought to keep their promises. Very true. But of course you must understand that rules of that sort can’t possibly be expected to apply to great thinkers and sages. No, Digory. Men like me are freed from common rules.” As he said this he looked so grave and noble that for a second Digory really thought he was saying something rather fine. But all at once he saw through Uncle Andrew’s grand words. “All it means,” he said to himself, “is that he thinks he can do anything he likes to get anything he wants.”15

As with his adult books, Lewis in his children’s books perpetually wants to inculcate wisdom and goodness into his readers. Honesty, courage, humility,

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and service are repeatedly held up in the series as characteristics to pursue and acquire. And when Lewis fears children may not get the point, as in this excerpt, he makes quite clear what is wrong in the thinking being presented. Teaching is such an important part of Lewis’s writing that I shall devote a complete section to this topic later in this chapter, under the heading “What Lewis Has to Teach Us.” ALLUSIONS Walter Hooper, who lived with Lewis for a few months near the end of his life as a secretary and personal assistant, wanted to make sure he fit himself properly into Lewis’s schedule, so he one day asked, “Do you take a nap in the afternoons?” Lewis responded with a smile, “No—but sometimes a nap takes me!” I remember when I first heard that story admiring Lewis’s wit, how quickly he could come up with an apt, clever answer. A few years later I read an unabridged edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for the first time. James Boswell, getting to know the much older and more famous Samuel Johnson (somewhat the eighteenth-century equivalent of C. S. Lewis), found himself in much the same position as the later Hooper. Early in their acquaintance Johnson made the witty (and to my knowledge original) remark, “I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night; and then the nap takes me.”16 I remember roaring when I read that, “What? Lewis stole that from Johnson!” But of course it wasn’t stealing; Lewis probably expected Hooper, as a man of letters, to recognize the quotation and to admire how splendidly it fit their current situation. C. S. Lewis was the most allusive popular writer of the twentieth century; he read voraciously, he remembered incredibly, and he included his memories in his works voluminously. Allusion, from Latin allusio (“a playing with”) involves making direct or indirect references to people, sayings, events, and literary works—well, almost anything. Almost everyone uses allusions to some extent; when someone refers to the patience of Job they are making a biblical allusion, and saying someone has the strength of Hercules is a mythological allusion. But writers use more allusions than most people, and certainly more allusions to literary works. When John Steinbeck named his novel Of Mice and Men, for instance, he was clearly alluding to Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse,” in which Burns comments on the plans “o’ mice and men.” But no other popular writer incorporates as many allusions as Lewis, and because it was such a distinctive feature of his writing, I shall devote a few pages to it. (In the interests of full disclosure, I will note that these examples come from my book The Keys to the Chronicles: Unlocking the Symbols of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia,17

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published by Broadman and Holman in 2005. It is the most complete and accurate study of Lewis’s Narnian allusions to date.) Sample Allusion from Lion: The Stone Table The Stone Table represents the Old Testament Law, specifically the Ten Commandments; thus it has ancient writing on the side of it, in keeping with Exodus 32:16: “And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God graven upon the tables.” According to the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments were given on Mount Sinai, which partially explains why the Stone Table in Lion is found on a hillside. (In addition, Calvary, the place of Jesus’ crucifixion, was a hill, and since Aslan is killed on the Stone Table, the hilltop location fits that aspect of the story as well.) A pavilion (tent) is located beside the Stone Table, representing the tabernacle of the Jewish religion in the Old Testament. Sample Allusion from Caspian: The Wer-Wolf The typical spelling is werewolf, but Lewis spells the word this way to draw attention to its linguistic origins: “wer” is the Anglo-Saxon word for man, so a wer-wolf is literally a man-wolf. Indeed, the creature is in the process of changing from man to wolf as it is killed. Significantly, at the time of death its head has already turned into a wolf while its body is still human. Lewis, as a teacher of medieval and Renaissance literature, was quite familiar with the duel between Reason and Passion, mentioned repeatedly in the literature of the period. Writers noted that we humans are a mix of rationality and emotions, which is fine; that’s part of what it means to be human. The danger comes when we let our emotions be in charge of our decision-making; emotions are intended as support troops, while reason is to be in charge. Since the wer-wolf has the animal head on top and the human part underneath, it is being governed by the bestial side, which leads to bad decision-making; a being split between human and animal should have the rational part on top to be good. Thus in Lion mixed beings with the human part on top (fauns, centaurs) support the side of Aslan, while mixed beings with the animal part on top (such as the Minotaur, a creature from Greek myth with a bull’s head on a human body) support the Witch. Sample Allusion from Treader: Aslan’s Table As noted earlier, Aslan’s Table represents the Lord’s Table, also known as Communion or Eucharist. Communion is a time to remember the death of

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Christ; thus we find the cross-like Knife of Stone, which killed Aslan, lying on the Table. The three lords of Narnia who get to the Table fail to recognize its significance, and in fact, one of them grabs the Knife to fight the others, whereupon they all fall asleep. This parallels the statement of I Corinthians 11:29-30, in which people approach the Lord’s Table “not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” The metaphorical sleep of I Corinthians 11 transposes into literal sleep in the allusion. Sample Allusion from Chair: Jill’s School Chair is the most autobiographical of the Chronicles, which helps explain why it is one of the less popular books in the series. On the first page Lewis comments on Jill’s school at length, working in his own thoughts on contemporary education. There were two problems with Jill’s school, Lewis notes in his authorial commentary: coeducation and bullying. The second of those problems Lewis had experienced himself as a precocious and somewhat arrogant youngster; in Surprised by Joy he called himself a “marked man” when it came to bullying,18 and the experience was repeated and painful enough to leave scars on his psyche years later. The first “weakness” in Jill’s school, Lewis thought, was that they tried to educate boys and girls together, which Lewis during most of his life feared would weaken the amount of knowledge gained by boys. This viewpoint does not endear Lewis to modern readers. Sample Allusion from Horse: The Sofa/Divan In the seventh chapter of Horse, Lewis engages in a piece of impressive linguistic place-setting. Unlike the other books of the series, Horse takes place primarily in Calormen, a dry, hot (calor is Latin and Spanish for hot) country with a Middle Eastern feel. A few pages into the chapter “Aravis in Tashbaan,” Aravis and Lasaraleen have to hide behind a couch. Significantly, however, Lewis does not call it a couch; he calls it a sofa. In fact, he repeatedly refers to it as a sofa while the girls are alone in the room, a total of four times. But then when the Tisroc, Rabadash, and Ahoshta enter the room, Lewis begins calling that item of furniture a divan, and he refers to it as a divan throughout the next chapter until the Calormen trio has left. Why? Let us consider the five most common options Lewis had for labeling the piece of furniture: couch, davenport, settee, sofa, and divan. Couch comes from French; davenport comes from the British maker’s name; settee comes from Anglo-Saxon; sofa and divan come from Turkish. Since this scene has a Middle Eastern setting, Lewis avoids the word choices from a Western

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European background and uses the two words of Middle Eastern derivation. That’s impressive. But there’s more. In English, sofa means only the piece of furniture. But divan, though we think of it today as having only one meaning, actually had two standard meanings in Renaissance English. The first, of course, is the article of furniture. But the other meaning is, in the words of one of my dictionaries, “a private political conference, particularly in Renaissance-era Turkey.” So Lewis uses the word sofa when there’s no conference in the room, and the word divan when there is. And this is no accident. Actually, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the political conference meaning entered the English language before the furniture meaning did. And if Lewis had found the meaning in no other place, he certainly would have known it from his beloved Paradise Lost. In Book 10, line 457, when Satan returns from having led humanity into the fall, he interrupts a conference of his colleagues; as Milton puts it, they “[R]aised from their dark divan.”19 So even in what would seem insignificant word choices, Lewis engages in linguistic subtlety that only his fellow-scholars could appreciate. Sample Allusion from Nephew: Digory Kirke In Nephew, we find out the last name of the professor from Lion; he is Professor Kirke. And that is significant in numerous ways. First, kirk is the Middle English (and Scottish) word for church. It was used allegorically by Edmund Spenser in one of Lewis’s favorite Renaissance works, The Faerie Queene, and in fact Lewis had already used kirk for church in one of his earliest books, Pilgrim’s Regress. Presumably Lewis named the professor in this way because it is through his house that the children come into contact with Aslan; in other words, it is through the church (kirk) that they get to meet Christ. Besides these linguistic and literary allusions, Lewis also picks the name to honor his high-school tutor, William Kirkpatrick, known as “Kirk” to the Lewis family. Thus the name “Kirke” allows Lewis his usual method of allusion-blending. Sample Allusion from Battle: Shift the Ape and Animal Farm C. S. Lewis loved George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, and in fact in 1955 published an article telling how much he preferred that book to Orwell’s more famous work 1984. The article (entitled “George Orwell”) was written in 1954, perhaps within a year of Lewis’s completing Battle. Shift in Battle displays a remarkable similarity to Napoleon, the leading animal (a pig) in

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Animal Farm. Possibly some similarities between the two are a natural outcome of any animal rising in status, but the extent of the similarities (and Lewis’s acknowledged fondness for Orwell’s novel) certainly suggests that some of the ideas for Shift’s behavior come from Napoleon’s behavior in Animal Farm. Here are some of the ways Shift parallels Napoleon: r Wearing clothes r Walking on two legs r Making other animals serve him r Wearing weapons r Finding new work continually for the other animals to do r Being less frequently seen as time passes r Taking up drinking r Telling the other animals that he is doing these things for their own good

More correspondences could be listed, but even this list seems to indicate that Lewis borrowed some concepts from Orwell regarding how an ascendant animal would act. WHAT LEWIS HAS TO TEACH US I was a nineteen-year-old college junior when I first read Bree’s response to Hwin in Horse about whether the two of them could continue traveling when they were bone weary: “I think, Ma’am,” said Bree very crushingly, “that I know a little more about campaigns and forced marches and what a horse can stand than you do.”20 When I read that sentence I had four thoughts instantly follow one another through my mind: (1) He’s not very nice; (2) That’s the way I sound when I put down people; (3) Maybe I’m not very nice; and (4) I’ve just learned something about myself from reading a children’s story about a horse; I need to read more of this author and see what else he can help me learn. And that has been the experience of numerous Lewis readers. Young and old, believing and nonbelieving, they find they gain intellectual understanding, spiritual insight, and character awareness from this children’s series. Rather than providing examples of moral and social teaching from each book, as was done with the allusions above, I would like to use one book as an example of how Lewis provides character education in the series. Thus, what are some values Lewis teaches in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

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Chapter 5: “Why Don’t They Teach Logic at These Schools?”21 Principle: Be Open to Something That Seems Wrong to You at First My first experience with Mr. Lewis was a violent one; I threw Mere Christianity across the room, bouncing it off my dorm wall, because it had theology that differed from what I already believed. One of the things Lewis wants to teach people, whatever their age or theological position, is to be willing to carefully consider opposing viewpoints. Peter and Susan automatically assume Lucy is wrong about saying she has been in a magic world, partly because there are no magic worlds (they think) and partly because she has not been gone from our world long enough for that to occur. The professor points out that there are other factors to consider. One of those is Lucy’s truthfulness level; another is that if Lucy were making the story up, she would be incredibly stupid not to hide longer, and Lucy does not seem incredibly stupid. Ever the moral philosopher and Christian teacher, Lewis does not want his readers (even for adult nonfiction) to reject miracles and the supernatural out-of-hand, so he begins logical preparation for that here. Chapter 6: “I Apologise”22 Principle: Apologize Quickly and Properly The novel says Peter turned “at once”23 to Lucy. Lewis’s point is that a person who has wronged someone should apologize as quickly as possible, and this particularly applies to Peter as the leader of the group; he serves as a role model of humility and correct behavior. It’s interesting to note that Susan does not apologize to Lucy here; perhaps that is one way of Lewis displaying Peter’s greater character and maturity. Chapter 6: “We Shan’t Take Them Even out of the Wardrobe”24 Principle: Think Through the Implications of Your Actions Lewis is always keenly aware that he is writing for children, some of whom will be influenced in thought and behavior by the models he presents. Elsewhere in Lion, for instance, Lewis repeatedly warns children against shutting doors behind themselves when they explore a wardrobe. Here, he doesn’t want children reading his books to think it’s OK to steal, so he carefully points out that since the coats are staying in the closet, they’re not being stolen. The same conflict appears in Horse, where Shasta has concerns about taking items they need for their flight, but Bree reassures him that in a wartime situation

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morality has a bit more flexibility regarding using the enemy’s things. That way of looking at it may be rather disingenuous, depending on the reader’s personal code of ethics, but the point is that Lewis is always concerned about the impact of his books upon children, and whenever characters appear to be doing wrong he has them fail or be punished (if in his judgment they really are doing wrong), or he explains why what looks wrong is actually OK in this particular case. Chapter 12: “Never Forget to Wipe Your Sword”25 Principle: Take Care of Your Belongings Every parent of a grade-schooler has experienced having a child neglecting to take care of personal belongings—leaving a bike in the rain, forgetting a basketball at the playground, failing to put away a toy and having it stepped on. Lewis knew this characteristic of children and has Aslan indicate to Peter that part of maturing is taking proper care of belongings. When we consider how many people drive around on underinflated tires or forget to change their furnace filters regularly, we realize that, as usual, Lewis has a message for adults as well as for children! Chapter 17: “It Was All Edmund’s Doing”26 Principle: Compliment People Who Do Well Children have to be trained to look beyond themselves and speak a word of encouragement to those who struggle or compliment to those who do well. With Peter making this remark about Edmund, perhaps part of Lewis’s point is that children particularly need to do this for their siblings! PREDICTING THE FUTURE FOR THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA The Chronicles of Narnia sold briskly from their first appearance in the 1950s and continue to do so today. There is no way to know for sure how many books have been sold nor how many readers the Chronicles have had, because of the variety of publishers and editions, the number of languages the books have been translated into, and the way the series tends to be passed along from one family member to another. Estimates are rough and vary widely, but they are always well up in the millions, and like the number of hamburgers sold by McDonald’s restaurants when they used to keep track on their front signage, the numbers increase by a significant amount every year.

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As I write this paragraph, the completed series has been out for fifty years. What will the next fifty years bring? Will parents, and children, and scholars still be enjoying and perusing the Chronicles in 2056? I believe the Chronicles will easily maintain both their popularity and their critical attention for decades to come. Three main factors will keep the Chronicles popular. First, in the field of children’s literature, fantasy works have a longer “shelf life” than books of contemporary realism. I teach a course at my university entitled “Young Adult Literature and Writing,” and it is amazing how quickly the books become dated. The oldest book I currently use is The Pigman by Paul Zindel, published in 1968. My students are always flabbergasted that one of the (urban) characters has never heard of a credit card and has to have its use explained to him. A nontraditional student in her thirties commented this year, regarding a part of the plot where a character fixes a telephone dial so it won’t turn, that middle school students will need to have the concept of a telephone with a rotary dial explained to them. As I glanced around the room, some of the twenty-year-olds looked like they were a bit fuzzy about the use of rotary dials themselves! Realism in itself does not rapidly date a book, if it is historical realism, such as the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Mark Twain; rather, it is the author trying to be “up-to-date” who will become dated most rapidly. With medieval fantasy, however, readers expect the language and adventures to be somewhat old-fashioned. A second factor to keep the Chronicles popular is the theological content of the books. Many adults remember certain books from their childhood fondly—Pokey Little Puppy, Little Women, Green Eggs and Ham, Little House on the Prairie—but they are unlikely to go back and reread those classics unless they are reading them to their own children. This is not the case with the Chronicles, however. I have repeatedly met adults who have read and even reread the series while well past their childhood years, and usually it’s because they value the books for theology as well as plot and character. I belong to a Sunday School class that does book studies by authors such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and A. W. Tozer, and two of the books the class has studied are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. A final factor that appears destined to keep the Chronicles alive and well for at least the next decade is the success of motion pictures based on the series. After the success of movies based on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Hollywood decided a similar fantasy would do similarly well, and that reasoning was correct. The Lion movie had a budget of $180 million, and by the end of April 2006, the movie had grossed an astonishing $740 million worldwide, with over $290 million

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of that coming in the United States. Those are figures to spawn sequels, and the Caspian movie is thus due out in 2008. These statistics clearly show that few people were disappointed in the movie, despite the fact that no movie of reasonable length can contain all the elements and dialogue of even a children’s novel. People familiar with Lion would have noticed alterations and omissions. When my wife and I saw the movie, for instance, she was surprised and disappointed that Father Christmas gave gifts only to the children; she leaned over to me and whispered, “What happened to Mrs. Beaver’s sewing machine?” I noticed how many of the teaching elements were left out. As a teacher, I have always found Aslan’s inclusion of the other lion in chapter 16 with “us lions”27 to be impressive. Usually we think of humility as a person lowering himself or herself, but here we see Aslan raising another being to his level. The line, as well as the lion, was omitted from the movie, perhaps because it would confuse children. (And Lewis seems to have had second thoughts about the wisdom of a second lion himself, since no other living lions besides Aslan appear in the later books of the series.) For most viewers, however, these omissions were more than made up for by the spectacular special effects and high-quality production values. What sorts of things happen when a children’s book becomes a blockbuster movie? Here are some of the occurrences I saw around the time of the movie’s release, from late 2005 to early 2006: r Churches ran many Narnian events for their children’s programs. At one church

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I read about, a featured game was Narnian freeze tag, where the Witch froze players with a wand and the person playing Aslan would breathe on them to free them. Churches promoted Narnia in numerous other ways. Many had Lewis workshops; some had sermon series based on Narnia; many bought blocks of movie tickets. I heard of one showing where the entire theater was sold out to a pair of church groups. Reading groups—some secular, some religious—chose Lion for a book-of-themonth selection. Media attention went wild; Narnia was talked about in magazines, newspapers, radio, and television. Bookstores promoted the series heavily. One bookstore near my home put in large letters on their marquee, “YOUR NARNIA HEADQUARTERS.” The words were accurate. I entered and was stunned to find a huge four-sided display, complete with wardrobe on loan from a furniture store, covered with books, calendars, music, figurines, and other assorted apparatus. When I expressed my amazement to an employee, she said, “Did you see our other display?” The store had another huge four-sided display with more Narnian artifacts! I have on my desk an Aslan “snow globe” that one shakes to make glitter swirl around his mane; behind me is an Aslan from a fast-food meal, both gifts from friends of Narnia.

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With this sort of promotion and attention stretching out for the next decade, awareness of Narnia among popular audiences can only increase. Among critical audiences I also see continuing attention given to the Chronicles, probably more so than for any other series of children’s books. Two main factors will contribute to this. First is the variety of places in a college curriculum where the books might appear. A typical children’s series, such as the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books by Betty MacDonald, can only be studied in a children’s literature course. The Chronicles of Narnia, in contrast, can be found in any number of courses in higher education: children’s literature, fantasy literature, religious literature, C. S. Lewis, and the Inklings. Unlike other children’s literature, which can only be found in English or Education departments, the Chronicles are used in Religion departments as well. For books to receive scholarly attention, they must be read by scholars, and this will continue to be the case for the Chronicles. More importantly, the Chronicles will continue to generate scholarly articles because they have so much greater depth and complexity than the average children’s book series. Virtually everything that can be written about another children’s book (plot, character, theme, and teachability, etc.) can be written about the Chronicles as well, plus the layering of allusions, noted above, provides a dimension of study for this series lacking in other books. When people are asked which C. S. Lewis book has most influenced them spiritually, the most common answer is Mere Christianity. But if people were asked which C. S. Lewis book they have enjoyed the most, I suspect the most common answer would be, “The Chronicles of Narnia.” NOTES 1. Bruce L. Edwards, Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005). 2. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Macmillan, 1950). 3. C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 123. 4. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 174. 5. C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 21. 6. C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 98. 7. Ibid., 131. 8. Ibid., 146. 9. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 8. 10. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, 41. 11. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 132. 12. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 135. 13. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 37.

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14. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 59. 15. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 18. 16. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946), 327. 17. Marvin D. Hinten, The Keys to the Chronicles: Unlocking the Symbols of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005). 18. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), 94. 19. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 417. 20. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, 131. 21. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 45. 22. Ibid., 51. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 52. 25. Ibid., 129. 26. Ibid., 175. 27. Ibid., 171.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946. Edwards, Bruce L., Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005. Hinten, Marvin D., The Keys to the Chronicles: Unlocking the Symbols of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2005. Lewis, C. S., The Horse and His Boy. New York: Macmillan, 1954, 98. ———. The Last Battle. New York: Macmillan, 1956, 135. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Macmillan, 1950. ———. The Magician’s Nephew. New York: Macmillan, 1955, 8. ———. Prince Caspian. New York: Macmillan, 1951, 123. ———. The Silver Chair. New York: Macmillan, 1953, 21. ———. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956, 94. ———. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” New York: Macmillan, 1952, 174. Milton, John, Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957, 417.

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Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, and Children of Aslan: An Environmentalist Perspective on The Chronicles of Narnia Margarita Carretero-Gonz´alez

Whereas the reader of C. S. Lewis’s academic writings may easily ignore the activism as Christian apologist, which made him so famous and once led J. R .R. Tolkien to refer to him as “Everyman’s Theologian,”1 this is something impossible to do when one approaches his fictional works. Indeed, it would be unwise, for instance, to try to ignore the religious component in The Chronicles of Narnia, since the seven-volume set was precisely one of Lewis’s ways “to say something about Christianity to children”2 even if, as he admitted, at first there was nothing Christian about the images that triggered the stories. The Christian element that informs The Chronicles of Narnia or The Cosmic Trilogy is in consonance with the worldview Lewis considered to be the correct one. His opinions about authority, obedience, or the relationship between the genders—to name a few of the issues that have stirred more controversy— permeate the pages of his fictional works and may certainly take aback the readers who have grown up questioning the whole issue of authority. There are, however, other matters in which Lewis seems to be ahead of his time, especially as concerns his respect for the natural environment.

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An environmentally conscious reader who decides to open the pages of Prince Caspian, for instance, will certainly take pleasure in the way Lewis constructs the relationship between human and nonhuman forms of existence, presenting as a desirable world order one that respects lives outside the human species. If he/she decides to start the series in internal chronological order, that is, according to the chronology of events in Narnia itself, the reader will then see that the world of Narnia was created on the principle of equality among the animals—that is, the Talking Beasts, one is forced to specify—and that, after Digory, a Son of Adam, brought evil into Narnia, it was his task to join the Narnians and struggle against the forces threatening that balance. This makes the series consistent with both ecological thought (in one of its lighter shades, however, since it displays a somewhat patronizing attitude toward the nonhuman)—and with Lewis’s own Christian values. Nevertheless, it is my contention that, since the Christian component takes precedence over any type of environmental worry, some of Lewis’s tenets—such as human superiority over the rest of the nonhuman world—are not very palatable to ecologists in general and of modern ecotheologians in particular. Before further exploring this issue, it will be useful to pay attention to the views Lewis held on nonhuman animals as he expressed them when dealing with animal suffering in The Problem of Pain. LEWIS ON ANIMAL PAIN Lewis’s brief and insightful excursion on the issue of animal pain raises some very interesting questions concerning the relationship between human and nonhuman animals, which is nowadays at the core of important debates in ecological thinking.3 When discussing animal rights, for instance, it is always advisable to approach the subject from a nonanthropocentric position; that is, we must tale not to judge everything in terms of what is good or bad for our species, lest we be accused of what Mary Midgley calls “human chauvinism.”4 In dealing with animal pain, Lewis is fully aware of these dangers. However, he seems to hold the view that anthropocentrism may be a first good step to raise awareness. After all, acknowledging that a nonhuman animal may suffer like a human may eventually lead to a respect for that suffering and reluctance to inflict it. For Lewis, animal pain is “appalling” since the Christian explanations of human pain he has given in the previous chapters of The Problem of Pain cannot be extended to nonhuman animals: “So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it.”5 It is good that Lewis admits that most of his statements are based on guesswork, since they can be thoughtfully challenged. One might

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argue, for instance, why he finds it necessary to establish a difference between the way human and nonhuman animals experience pain. For him, it is incorrect to utter the statement “This animal feels pain,” when one should instead say “Pain is taking place in this animal,”6 thus rendering the nonhuman animal as a mere recipient of an event—in fact, even a location where the particular event unfolds—rather than an experiencer. Trying hard not to privilege anthropocentrism, Lewis warns the reader that an inappropriate behavior for one species does not equate with the same behavior in another, and may indeed not be wrong for another. Thus, “[a] forest in which half the trees are killing the other half may be a perfectly ‘good’ forest: for its goodness consists in its utility and beauty and it does not feel [italics added].”7 However, no matter how hard Lewis tries to avoid anthropocentrism, the conclusion of this statement betrays the fact that he judges the goodness of this particular forest depending on the service it renders to the human beholder, as the italicized words indicate. In the same way, while he admits that certain animals may have “in some degree, a self, or a soul which connects experiences and gives rise to rudimentary individuality,”8 Lewis negates any possibility of their reaching immortality unless it is through human intervention: “certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.”9 Denying the existence of an immortal soul in the animal, unless provided by its relationship to a human, runs close to negating any intrinsic value in the animal itself. In fact, Lewis goes as far as to say that a tame animal is “in the deepest sense, the only ‘natural’ animal—the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy [italics added],”10 and that this tame animal owes its real self or personality “almost entirely to its master.”11 In drawing this conclusion concerning not only animal pain but also animal immortality, Lewis does not depart from the biblical account of the relationship established by God between humans and beasts, but he makes clear that the superior position given to humans entails a high degree of responsibility toward those who are inferior: “Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by Divine right.”12 Although this assertion is helpful in raising awareness about our duty to respect all forms of life, it is extremely condescending and difficult to make it coexist with ecological ethics, since, as said above, it just values an animal depending on the relationship established with humans, thus providing an instance of human chauvinism: “The error we must avoid is that of considering them [higher animals] in themselves. Man is to be understood only in his relation to God. The beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man, and through man, to God.”13

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Eventually, Lewis believes wholeheartedly in the human capacity to restore peace into the nonhuman animal world, “and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.”14 To admit that humans can contribute to the lessening of pain in the animal world is perfectly legitimate—after all, much of this pain is inflicted by us— but to believe that humans can run close to eradicate it is, again, an exercise in anthropocentrism. There are patterns of nonhuman animal behavior that humans are not expected to and should not try to control, no matter how disagreeable they may appear to us as a species. As Nathan Kowalsky puts it, “to expect coyotes not to kill and eat rodents, or adult male lions not to kill lion cubs of another sire, means we expect nonhuman nature to act like a good human being even outside its interaction with us. These expectations are bizarre—unless, of course, we think human beings really are the centre of the universe.”15 That is precisely the issue at stake here; Lewis had complete faith in the dogma that humans had been appointed by God to be the center of the universe and this assertion can hardly be reconciled with deep ecological ethics. LEWIS AND AQUINAS Lewis’s own respect for nature and animals is consonant with St. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical considerations about the physical reality of the universe and the role of humans in it. According to John Haught, in basing much of his philosophy on Aristotelian realism, Aquinas’s impregnated the Christian mind with a respect for nature, which was not very common at the time in Christian discourses.16 In his hierarchical organization of the universe, Aquinas establishes an “ontological link between the spiritual and the material, a hierarchical structure which,” in Mark Muldoon’s words, “gives a foundation for reverence of other creatures as brothers and sisters sharing the relationship of divine recognition and dependence.”17 Both Lewis and Aquinas concur that, in order to achieve ultimate union with God, human beings need to transcend the material world, because nature is imperfect. It is this idea of “ordered discontinuity” where the rub resides to make both Lewis’s and Aquinas’s tenets difficult to be completely appropriated by environmental ethicists. A closer look at some of Aquinas’s views in the Compendium of Theology or the Summa Theologicae will show where both he and Lewis rub shoulders. In his Compendium of Theology, Aquinas states that “although all creatures are ordained to the divine goodness as their end . . . ‘some are closer to the end than others, and so participate in the divine goodness more abundantly.’ ”18 Further on, he argues that lesser creatures, having a smaller share in their

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divine goodness, “are in some way subordinated to higher beings as to their ends;” thus, “lower beings realize their last end chiefly by their subordination to higher beings; . . . lifeless beings exist for living beings, plants for animals, and the latter for man; . . . the whole of the material nature is subordinate to intellectual nature . . . the whole of material nature exists for man.”19 Likewise, in Summa Theologicae, Aquinas asserts that “‘the less perfect fall to the use of the more perfect’ such as the life of animals and plants is preserved not for themselves but for humankind.”20 This series of examples serves to illustrate the problems arising when trying to use Lewis’s and Aquinas’s views of the nonhuman world for environmental awareness: they offer a good step in that they invite the reader to respect forms of life outside humanity, but fall short of being completely acceptable for environmental ethics since they are terribly anthropocentric, confusing the use a human being can make of a nonhuman animal with the role that the animal has to perform in life. A meat-eating human, for instance, may use a lamb to obtain nourishment from it, but that is not necessarily what the lamb was made for. The lamb’s intrinsic value resides in its mere existence, its needs to eat, breathe, drink, and reproduce. Thus, although the interests of a lamb—or even those of a tree, for that matter—may differ from ours, they still have to be acknowledged as legitimate interests for the lamb and the tree. In reviewing what makes Lewis’s views on animal suffering not fully compatible with current animal ethics, my desire is not to critique his argumentation; on the contrary, even if I cannot embrace his views, they are perfectly in consonance with the religious creed that informs them; the same that runs in the pages of The Chronicles of Narnia. To his credit, Lewis created a secondary world where the nonhuman animals could achieve a sort of agency and employ self-motivated action, thereby rendering the reader more aware of the intrinsic value of animals. A closer analysis of the seven books reveals, nevertheless, that Narnia is ultimately built upon the same account of human superiority and responsible stewardship model depicted in Genesis. ANIMALS IN NARNIA The happy land of Narnia—Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests ringing with the hammers of the Dwarfs. Oh the sweet air of Narnia! An hour’s life there is better than a thousand years in Calormen.21

After reading evocations or descriptions of Narnia like the one above, it is tempting to try to envision Lewis’s imaginary world as a sort of utopian realm, an idyllic paradise where life is led with no worries. Truly, like the horse

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Bree and many other Narnians, the narrator very frequently praises Narnia for its natural resources. In a way, it seems as if Lewis, lamenting the way humans have become separated from both God and nature after the Fall, had attempted to create a secondary world where this breach was less evident. In contrast to merry England whence the Pevensie children come, nature in Narnia is always perceived as richer and brighter. Thus, for instance, the blaze of sunshine that greets Jill Pole on her first entering Narnia makes “the drops of water on the grass glitter like beads”; the turf is “smoother and brighter than Jill had ever seen before,” and the things she observes darting to and fro in the blue sky are “so bright that they might have been jewels or huge butterflies.”22 Indeed, passages of great beauty abound whenever the Narnian landscape is described, especially when, at the end of The Last Battle, the characters reach the Real Narnia, which is, truly, a reenactment of Paradise. In contrast to this Real Narnia, the one the children travel to and from before the railway accident, has experienced the presence of evil from the beginning of its existence. Narnia is, like ours, a fallen world. From the very first moment Narnia entered his imagination, Lewis conceived the breach with nature as an external symptom of the loss of innocence, much in the same way as it is narrated in Genesis. Here God quarantined the first humans from the original paradaisal earth, their fall displacing the earlier harmonious bond between human and nonhuman nature with an antagonistic relationship. This is the germ of the story that would later become realized in The Magician’s Nephew; preserved in “The Lefay Fragment,” it tells the story of Digory, a child who loses his ability to speak with the animals and the trees after he is persuaded by an Eve-like Polly to cut a limb off the big Oak in his garden in order to make a raft.23 In the definitive version, it is also his thirst for knowledge that moves Digory to give in to temptation and ring the bell that awakens Jadis, thus starting a chain of events that will lead to the arrival of evil in Narnia. On this occasion, however, Polly acts not as a temptress, but as the voice of conscience that Digory chooses to ignore. Granted that Narnia is no earthly paradise, it is however true that Lewis created a world that could be more appealing to the 1950s reader than the industrialized England the children—and the reader himself/herself—came from. Even if a fallen world, Narnia is still a place where the importance of keeping a harmonious relationship between the human and the nonhuman is more easily perceived; the characters are rewarded or punished depending not only on how they related to each other, but also on the way they treat other species. As Mar´ıa Jos´e de la Torre-Moreno has pointed out, beneath the religious intentions and references in The Chronicles of Narnia, “there surfaces a series of social and political implications underscoring the tenor of the

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moral indoctrination pervasive in the tales: the observation of the principle of authority,” a cult of authority that also permeates Lewis’s “approach to literary criticism and his vision of literature itself.”24 Indeed, from the very beginning, Narnia is hierarchically structured and the triumph of good over evil always depends on the success in keeping the status quo. HIERARCHY IN NARNIA Immediately after he has awakened them, Aslan establishes a hierarchical organization of the world and the creatures he has originated. Pacing to and fro among the animals, the pairs the lion selects automatically leave their kind, follow him, and form a wide circle around him. These become the Talking Beasts that are hierarchically superior to the Dumb Beasts who wander away and get lost in the distance. Before this first division takes place, the narrative seems to imply that certain species of animals are not eligible to be given the capacity of speech, since Aslan passes over them altogether.25 The chosen ones, in contrast, are literally given the rest of Narnia and the other creatures: “Creatures, I give you yourselves,” said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. “I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return. Do not so.”26

The above quotation illustrates Meredith Veldman’s contention that the work of C. S. Lewis, embedded in “the romantic tradition of protest,” reveals a romantic worldview that calls the human being “to an awareness and an appreciation of the nonhuman realms.”27 In the tradition of children’s classics such as The Wind in the Willows, Black Beauty, or the tales of Beatrix Potter, Lewis’s use of talking animals certainly makes it easier for the child reader to come closer to their concerns. Furthermore, granting speech—and, therefore a conscience, and even a soul—to nonhuman animals does not contradict the Christian doctrine Lewis was trying to put across to young readers. As he explained in his Letters to Children, the world of Narnia entered Lewis’s mind with a picture and a supposition: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”28 It follows, then, that “since Narnia is a world of Talking Beats . . . He would become a Talking Beast there, as He became a man here.”29 In this secondary world of Narnia, the talking beasts are given the same position as humans in our primary world. However, Lewis needed to make clear his belief in the superiority of human

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over nonhuman animals and so, as Trufflehunter puts it, “Narnia was never right except when a son of Adam was king. . . . It’s not Men’s country . . . but it is a country for a man to be king of.”30 Narnia certainly is a multicultural, multiracial, world inhabited by all sorts of species and mythological creatures: “It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts.”31 Therefore, even if, as Veldman contends, the roads leading to Narnia “cut through the quads and common rooms of this elite university [Oxford],” and the resulting fantasy world, “like Oxford in the middle of the twentieth century, [is] male dominated, hierarchical, and communal,”32 it displays a more holistic conception of life in the way the narrative deals with the interrelation between the human and the nonhuman, and the need to respect every single form of life that works, so as to keep the established order. RULING RIGHTS IN NARNIA Not every human being, however, is entitled to rule over Narnia. In fact, Lewis seems to be harsher in the way the narrative deals with those humans who try to break the hierarchy established by Aslan than he is with any of the other nonhuman characters. Accordingly, the human races of the Calormenes and the Telmarines share an eagerness to impose their own order and control the natural world. In contrast, from the first king, the cabby Frank, any rightful king of Narnia must show a respect for human and nonhuman forms of existence. In this manner, Lewis uses the relationship humans establish with the nonhuman world as a characterization tool from the very beginning: the good characters bear respect to other species and their environment, whereas the wicked—ranging from the real evil to the plain nasty—fail to establish a dialogical relationship with any manifestation of the nonhuman. For them, the natural environment is just something to control, destroy, or simply profit from. In The Magician’s Nephew, for instance, the Faustian character of Uncle Andrew dismisses Digory’s complaints about the magician’s use of guinea pigs for his experiments in the following terms: “That’s what the creatures were for. I’d bought them myself.”33 The wicked uncle only regrets that the guinea pigs cannot communicate with humans and are therefore rendered useless for him. In contrast, Digory appreciates the creatures’ intrinsic value, irrespective of their usefulness for humans. His adoption of the guinea pigs’ perspective when imagining their disorientation in a world they do not know is ridiculed by Digory’s uncle, who retorts that he is looking at the whole issue “from the wrong point of view.”34 Applying Lewis’s stance on animal suffering in The

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Problem of Pain, Digory might be charged with “the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of reading into the beasts a self for which there is no real evidence”35 —after all, it later turns out that Polly and Digory find that the guinea pig is perfectly happy in the Wood between the Worlds, away from mad scientific experimentation— but Digory is just acting responsibly toward this nonhuman form of life in a way Uncle Andrew cannot even understand. The same arrogant attitude toward any manifestation of the other—human or nonhuman—is displayed by Jadis when Polly accuses her of having killed all “the ordinary people . . . who’d never done [her] any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals,”36 following her uttering the Deplorable Word in the battle with her sister. “I was the Queen,” Jadis refutes, “They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”37 Any type of supremacy, whether biologically or socially conferred, entails in Lewis’s worldview a greater degree of responsibility toward those who are inferior. Jadis’s dictatorial ruling can only bring forth death, as seen in the dying world of Charn or in the perpetual winter that envelops Narnia during her illegitimate reign. Her pale face and red mouth, a symbol of femininity, purity, and potential sexual appeal in the traditional tale of Snow White is here subverted and transformed into sterile beauty. Jadis is certainly beautiful, but also “proud and cold and stern,”38 more similar to Andersen’s villainous Snow Queen than to the Grimm Brothers’ heroine.39 The changes in the natural landscape following the children’s arrival in Narnia and the return of Aslan, herald the witch’s eventual defeat and the restoration of natural balance. The first bird they see—a robin, a symbol of fertility—announces the return of the natural cycles to the previously wintry landscape. What is also common to such wicked characters is that they pose a threat to the harmonious order, and refuse to develop the willingness to communicate and cooperate with the surrounding world. Hence, while Polly, Digory, and the cabby stand as if mesmerized, enjoying the natural wonders displayed as the world of Narnia takes shape, Uncle Andrew and Jadis are incapable of appreciating the beauty of the moment. While Polly shows no fear of Aslan and is the first to comprehend clearly the connection between the lion’s song and the created world, Uncle Andrew fails to understand anything, and Jadis simply hates the music. The magician can only value the commercial possibilities the place offers if properly exploited. In consonance with his imperialistic mentality, it is imperative “to get that brute [Aslan] shot,”40 to remove any possible threat. The narrator informs the reader that all witches, “are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.”41 This assertion, as we will see, is not exclusive to the White Witch, but is a characteristic shared by all the evil characters in the seven Chronicles. Already before the journey to Narnia, a clear differentiation is established between Jadis and

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the future King Frank. While she mercilessly flogs the horse, the cabby risks his own safety just to calm him down. Once in Narnia, his closeness to the earth—he sings a “harvest thanks-giving hymn”42 that neither Jadis nor Uncle Andrew join—discloses him as the perfect candidate to occupy the throne of Narnia. Frequently, the redemption of a wicked character is externally manifested in his ability to establish a dialogical relationship with the Other, once all prejudices have been removed and its intrinsic value appreciated. The character of Eustace Scrubb undergoes this type of change. When he makes his first appearance in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Pevensie children’s cousin is presented as a disagreeable creature, only fond of animals “especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card,”43 and terribly egocentric. In contrast with Lucy, who acknowledges Reepicheep’s otherness and refrains from cuddling the mouse—no matter how much she wants to—because she knows he would find it offensive, Eustace shows no such respect and constantly mocks him. His early attraction for the name Calormene is a clear indicator of his twisted nature and urgent need of redemption. For that to take place, Eustace will literally have to get in the skin of one manifestation of the Other he so much detests—a dragon on this occasion—until he learns to see the world outside his old Self. Ironically, in the process of the renovation undergone by Eustace, Reepicheep plays no small part. The mouse not only intercedes for him, but also comforts the dragon in his lonely nights. The narrator underlines the signs of improvement discernible in the character even before he goes back to his human form, by describing the dragon as “a very humane killer too, for he could dispatch a beast with one blow of his tail so that it didn’t know (and presumably still doesn’t know) it had been killed.”44 Unlike Eustace (or even Edmund, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), Uncle Andrew does not learn to appreciate the intrinsic value of other forms of life outside his own, thus remaining unredeemed. The redemption process begins by learning that each individual is “part of a whole system in which every constituent plays an important role,”45 and act accordingly. After years of cruel experiments with animals, Uncle Andrew is afraid of them when he is in a disadvantageous position in Narnia. Incapable of bridging the gap that separates him from them (the Self from the Other), he simply cannot understand that they mean no harm. As Aslan explains to Digory, “he has made himself unable to hear my voice.”46 In vain does the lion try to comfort him; Uncle Andrew can only hear a roar whenever Aslan addresses him. Similarly, in The Last Battle, Lucy and Aslan attempt to open the dwarves’ eyes to the world surrounding them, which they perceive as a dark stable. Unable to enjoy the sights, the smells, or the flavor of the delicacies offered

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to them, the dwarves remain trapped in a prison that, according to Aslan “is only in their own minds.”47 They rest isolated from the community they have betrayed, true to their constantly repeated motto “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.” LEWIS’S PORTRAYAL OF NONHUMAN PERSPECTIVES Having a children’s audience in mind, Lewis likes to play with different points of view in order to make an incursion into the nonhuman perspective. The narrative enables the child to perceive herself from the viewpoint of the Other. He does this most brilliantly when Lucy first encounters Mr. Tumnus. One can just imagine the young reader sharing Lucy’s astonishment at getting a sight of a Faun. Suddenly, she realizes that the Faun shares the same astonishment: “You are in fact Human?”48 Lucy, understandably, fails to see the meaning of the question at first—what else could she be? She later has the opportunity to perceive her Self as Other while having a look at the Faun’s library, holding titles such as Men, Monks and Gamekeepers; a Study in Popular Legend, or, more revealingly: Is Man a Myth? In this alternative world, humans are the Other. Later, Edmund undergoes a similar experience when, trapped in his own individuality, he fails to understand the question the White Witch has to repeat up to three times: “What are you?” When Jadis, for the fourth time insists, “But what are you?” she finally succeeds in eliciting from him the appropriate answer. Edmund is one of the feared humans.49 Nowhere in The Chronicles of Narnia is this shift in perspective more clearly expressed than in the title The Horse and His Boy, in which the inversion of the traditional relationship between the possessor and the possessed draws attention to the leading role of the horse. Although the association between Shasta and Bree develops on equal grounds (they both need each other to reach the north) it is the horse that acts as a guide away from Calormen and toward Narnia. Bree not only teaches Shasta to ride—obviously without reins or stirrups—but he also educates Aravis in the way she should now relate to both Hwin and himself. That Aravis sees herself superior to Shasta and any of the horses is evident when she automatically accuses the boy of having stolen Bree. “[I]f there’s been any stealing,” the horse rebukes, “you might just as well say I stole him.”50 Later, Bree reminds the Calormene girl that the idea of her owning Hwin is just an illusion: “Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well say you’re her human.”51 Hwin, on her part, is less self-assured than Bree, and progressively becomes more outspoken, siding with the member of her own species when Aravis instructs her to tell Bree to mind his own business: “ ‘No, I won’t,’ said the mare putting her ears back, ‘This is my escape just as much as yours.’ ”52

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On other occasions, the reader is reminded of her condition of Other for the nonhuman animals by some funny comments on their part. Thus, feeling that he has been too hard on the young boy, Bree tries to comfort Shasta: “Poor little beast. . . . I forget you are only a foal.”53 In The Last Battle, the narrator ends Emeth’s account of his religious experience with Aslan in a comic note, when the good Calormene uses the term “dog” in a way that clearly indicates he perceives them as inferior creatures: “[. . .] And this is the marvel of marvels, that he [Aslan] called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog—” “Eh? What’s that?” said one of the Dogs. “Sir,” said Emeth. “It’s but a fashion of speech which we have in Calormen.” “Well, I can’t say it’s one I like very much,” said the Dog. “He doesn’t mean any harm,” said an older Dog. “After all, we call our puppies Boys when they don’t behave properly.” “So we do,” said the first Dog. “Or girls.” “S-s-sh!” said the Old Dog. “That’s not a nice word to use. Remember where you are.”54

Together with the detailed account of their cruel actions, Lewis uses language as a powerful tool for characterizing the Calormenes, offering the reader many instances of what Bree identifies as “Calormene talk.”55 Prince Rabadash shares with other villains, such as Jadis and Uncle Andrew, a lack of care for and a will to get rid of anything that is not profitable: “[W]hy should we think twice about punishing Narnia any more than about hanging an idle slave or sending a worn-out horse to be made into dog’s meat?”56 This arrogant attitude, which contrasts with the reverence Narnians hold for their environment, reaches its highest note in The Last Battle. Knowing that the Calormenes are murdering the trees, the sight of one of them mistreating a talking horse is enough to enrage King Tirian and, with the unicorn Jewel, instantly kill the offender. This action, which Tirian comes to regret because it was dishonorable, is however symptomatic of the monarch’s high regard for the creatures in his kingdom, a common trait shared by all the legitimate rulers of Narnia. Lewis and Monarchy C. S. Lewis was a clear supporter of the concept of the British monarchy. Defending this form of government, he deplored, in his essay “Equality,” that “envious sort of mind which hates all superiority” suggesting “[t]hat mind . . . is the special disease of democracy,” whilst describing as a “prosaic barbarian” the man “who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand,

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nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience in the other, the man who has never wanted to kneel or to bow.”57 After defending the benefits of the British monarchy, he finally celebrates its contribution to satisfy “the craving for inequality.”58 One must necessarily agree with Walter Hooper’s observation that “[t]he books in which Lewis most rejoiced in Monarchy and Inequality are, of course, the Chronicles of Narnia.”59 Indeed, in Narnia, a responsible monarchy is the best answer to all evils. In fact, those who fight on Aslan’s side do so to keep the order he established, an order which is decidedly hierarchical and patriarchal, as Aslan’s first salute to the Pevensie children clearly indicates: “Welcome, Peter, Son of Adam [. . .]. Welcome Susan and Lucy, Daughters of Eve. Welcome He-Beaver and SheBeaver.”60 In the lion’s address, humans take precedence over nonhumans and males over females. As has been repeated, in Lewis’s view, precedence also implies higher responsibility toward those below, not the abuses of authority displayed by all who misunderstand the nature of power. The climax in The Magician’s Nephew comes when Aslan asks Frank, as the first King of Narnia, to “rule and name all these creatures, and do justice among them, and protect them from their enemies when enemies arise” whilst treating them “kindly and fairly, remembering that they are not slaves like the dumb beasts of the world you were born in, but Talking Beasts and free subjects.”61 Here is the concept of responsible stewardship of the land of Narnia and its inhabitants that follows in all the books, something that becomes the main theme in Prince Caspian. Thus, the reign of the Pevensie children is always remembered as the Golden Age of Narnia, a time when “they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down.”62 Likewise, the rule of King Tirian, the last King of Narnia, is emblematic of this harmony, specially displayed in his relationship with “his dearest friend, Jewel the Unicorn. They loved each other like brothers and each had saved the other’s life in the wars.”63 In Prince Caspian, the young protagonist becomes the Arthurian figure that has to restore the order broken by his own people, the Telmarines. Longing to believe in the existence of a variety of nonhuman entities, relegated to the realm of myth and legend by his ancestors and the present king in an attempt to obliterate the past, Caspian learns the true history from his tutor, Doctor Cornelius, a half-dwarf who explains to the Prince that Narnia does not belong to Men and that his people are, in fact, a bunch of usurpers: All you have heard about Old Narnia is true. It is not the land of Men. It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts. It was against these that the first Caspian fought. It is you Telmarines who silenced the

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beasts and the trees and the fountains, and who killed and drove away the Dwarfs and Fauns, and are now trying to cover up even the memory of them. The King does not allow them to be spoken of.64

In this sense, the Telmarines are not very different from the Calormenes. Like Jadis before them, the Telmarines have imposed an order that challenges Aslan’s conception of Narnia, an order that is maintained—as in any dictatorship—by keeping the subjects in ignorance and fear. Nature is now perceived as an enemy, and a thick wood is allowed to grow between the land and the sea, in order to hinder access to it. The sea, as the place where Aslan comes from, acquires the connotations of the enlightenment the inhabitants of Narnia are barred from. Given the damage they have caused to the trees, the Telmarines are afraid of the wood, a fear Caspian has naturally inherited: “He remembered that he was, after all, a Telmarine, one of the race who cut down trees wherever they could and were at war with all wild things; and though he himself might be unlike other Telmarines, the trees could be not expected to know this.”65 The dynasty of the Telmarines views monarchy as an enactment of tyranny rather than responsible stewardship, clearly far from the pledge taken by King Frank when his reign started. From that body of rotten rulers who have silenced the multiplicity of voices that could previously be heard in Narnia, Caspian is the one chosen to “try to find a way of awaking the trees once more.”66 If those who are higher up in the social or biological scale have their duty toward those who are below, an irresponsible action usually entails a demotion while, in some cases, a good action entails a promotion, such as the mice acquiring the faculty of speech for showing respect and cutting Aslan’s cords after his sacrifice. Degradation after a dishonorable action seems to be in tune with Lewis’s views on the consequences for humans after the Fall. Hence, “one result of man’s fall was that his animality fell back from the humanity into which it had been taken up but which could no longer rule it.”67 In a similar line, Aslan warns the Talking Beasts of the possibility of their becoming dumb if they err in their conduct. Such is, in fact, the case of the cat, Ginger in The Last Battle, who loses the faculty of speech and, it must be inferred, the possibility to have a soul. Likewise, in Prince Caspian, when the festive revelers who parade along the countryside celebrating their victory come across a man beating a boy, the forces of nature respond by making the stick “burst into flower in the man’s hand,” thus transforming an instrument of aggression into a traditional offering of love. When the man rejects the flower and tries to drop it, he simply cannot and suffers an involution: “His arm became a branch, his body the trunk of a tree, his feet took root,”68 while,

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in a like manner, the schoolchildren who mock their teacher are transformed into pigs. The punishment awarded for the degree of evil committed varies not only according to the crime itself but also depending on the species that has committed it. Hence, at times Lewis seems to be harsher with the humans than with the nonhumans, since those are supposed to know better and act accordingly. As argued earlier, the Calormenes are on the top of the evil scale, since they commit the most terrible crime: mistreating and killing talking animals and waking trees.69 The Telmarines’ fondness for hunting animals for sport, even if they are dumb, is also frowned upon. Meat-eating, however, is a legitimate practice for humans, but, as the incident of the bear in Prince Caspian reveals, perceived as evil in nonhuman animals. In “Animal Pain,” Lewis saw carnivorousness as a consequence of the Satanic Fall, and, consequently, a source of evil. Living in a fallen world—be it Narnia or our own—we have to learn to live with the fact that some animals are carnivores and cause a lot of suffering. We should imagine that the standards are equally applicable to human carnivores and nonhuman carnivores. Yet, they do not seem to be for Lewis. When the narrator affirms that “[b]ear that has lived too much on other animals is not very nice, but bear that has had plenty of honey and fruit is excellent, and this turned out to be that sort of bear. It was a truly glorious meal,”70 he is clearly using double standards to judge carnivorousness. Whereas it seems to be wrong for the bear to eat other animals, a bear that does it is “not very nice”—it is perfectly acceptable for the children to eat this almost vegetarian bear. In this case, humans get away with what Lewis considers a source of evil—they cannot help it because it is a consequence of living in a fallen world—even though humans can choose vegetarianism in a way a nonhuman animal cannot. This episode helps to prove that their superior state exempts humans from certain moral judgments cast on nonhuman animals. Harmony and Justice in Narnia In broad terms, Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology, which states that everything is connected and that nature is always wiser,71 truly operates in Narnia; nature certainly knows how to reward those who respect her and punish the abusers. In Prince Caspian, the Awakened Trees join the battle in order to help Peter, driving the Telmarines away among desperate cries of: “The Wood! The Wood! The End of the world!”72 In contrast, the reward for those who respect nature is bountiful. A somewhat orgiastic excess is displayed in the feast and dance of plenty started by Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads,

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with all sort of delicacies lavished on the Old Narnians, where even trees can enjoy a several-course meal prepared by the moles. The classical pagan deities and acolytes seem to work as instruments of nature’s generosity, since the feast comes into existence the moment they touch hands: sides of roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smell, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes, honey and many-coloured sugars and cream as thick as porridge and as smooth as still water, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, pears, grapes, strawberries, raspberries–pyramids and cataracts of fruit. Then, in great wooden cups and bowls and mazers, wreathed with ivy, came the wines; dark, thick ones like syrups of mulberry juice, and clear red ones like red jellies liquefied, and yellow wines and green wines and yellow-green and greenish-yellow.73

The feast is just the final stage of a carnivalesque parade that has been marching around the countryside in festive celebration of the renewal of the harmonious order desired by Aslan. The revelers, led by the lion, liberate everyone and everything from real or metaphorical chains forged by any sort of oppression, leaving a trail of ivy wherever they go. This joyous renovation affects both humans and nonhumans. Not only the children are freed from the fake history lessons, thus opening their eyes to the reality of what they had always believed was mere legend, but also the river is freed from the chains provided by the Bridge of Beruna, while the girl Gwendolene is helped by the Maenads to “take off some of the unnecessary and uncomfortable clothes that she was wearing” and “[s]ad old donkeys who had never known joy grew suddenly young again; chained dogs broke their chains; horses kicked their carts to pieces and came trotting along with them.”74 It is important to notice that, in all cases, the reward comes hand in hand with a celebration of community life, where humans and nonhumans gather in celebration, as a communal representation of the healthy body in which every limb plays a decisive role. In Lewis’s worldview, respecting the hierarchy is good for the community. Instances to illustrate this abound in Prince Caspian, with Pauline Bayne’s drawings becoming “more than illustrations . . . a collateral theme.”75 Thus, the illustration of this scene in the edition I am working with acts as a commentary on the prospective return to the harmony between human and nonhuman forms of life under Caspian’s rule. Prince Caspian, the badger Trufflehunter, and the dwarf Trumpkin engage with the fauns in a festive dance from which only Nikabrik excludes himself. Five pages later, Caspian holds council surrounded by fauns, rabbits, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, and all sorts of other animals. Finally, a later Baynes illustration offers an interesting contrast between the monolithic worldview imposed by the Telmarines who support King Miraz, and the diversity displayed by the Narnians who stick

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up for Peter in his fight against the king. All the Telmarines wear the same uniform and have assumed a similar posture, whereas the same variety of forms that gathered in the council around Caspian is perceived on the group supporting Peter. One of them, which appears to be a polecat, even looks at the reader as if asking her to join the group. The respect for hierarchy translates into a harmony that everyone enjoys equally, irrespective of their position in society. At the end of Prince Caspian, the renewed Telmarines are no longer afraid of the water, the wood, or the animals. They have joined the Narnians in a joyous celebration that ends in a happy circle, where no one takes predominance, after everyone has fallen asleep “with feet towards the fire and good friends on either side till at last there was silence all round the circle, and the chattering of water over stone at the Ford of Beruna could be heard once more.”76 While the revelers celebrate and rest, the narrator tells us that “all night Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.”77 One cannot fail to read in this suggestive image, a pleasant fusion of the masculine and feminine principles: the white goddess and the sun looking intently at each other. Indeed, Aslan is very frequently associated with the sun: his golden mane, his golden voice or, more explicitly, the light that emanates from him: “A golden light fell on them from the left. He [Shasta] thought it was the Sun. . . . It was from the Lion that the light came. No one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful.”78 Human and nonhuman forms of life, both pagan and Christian versions, all interact to give the world of Narnia the particular flavor that, despite common accusations that Narnia is a very conservative ecology of life, still makes it appealing to children—as the success of the latest film adaptation proves. One may note traces of Lewis’s alleged sexism and occasional patronizing attitude, but it would be a mistake to judge a writer without taking into account the times and place in which he had to live. In focusing too much on the negative aspects of the Narnian world, we may lose the benefit of seeing the environmentalist perspective Lewis does entertain, and there is certainly much in this regard within The Chronicles of Narnia to celebrate and enjoy. NOTES 1. Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien. A Biography (London: Grafton, 1992), 155. 2. C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said,” in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1984), 72. 3. The Great Ape project, for instance, following their motto “equality beyond humanity” can be seen as a first step to make other forms of life susceptible to

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receive the same legal and moral protection that only humans seem to be entitled to (Cf. “Great Ape Project,” http://www.greatapeproject.org). From what he expressed in his chapter on “Animal Pain” Lewis seems to share the same concern for nonhuman great apes: “Clearly in some ways the ape and man are much more like each other than either is like the worm.” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [London: Fount, 1990], 108). To know how far down the evolutionary scale Lewis would have considered appropriate to go is a debatable question. 4. Mary Midgely, “The End of Anthropocentrism?” in Philosophy and the Natural Environment, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 36, ed. Robin Attfield and Andrew Belsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 111. Quoted in Nathan Kowalsky, “Anthropocentrism and Natural Suffering,” in The Ranges of Evil. Multidisciplinary Studies of Human Wickedness, ed. William Myers (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2006), 64. 5. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 106. 6. Ibid., 109. 7. Ibid., 107. 8. Ibid., 110. 9. Ibid., 115. 10. Ibid., 114. 11. Ibid., 115. 12. Ibid., 114. 13. Ibid., 114. 14. Ibid., 112. 15. Kowalsky, The Range of Evil, 66. 16. John Haught, The Promise of Nature, Ecological and Cosmic Purpose (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 81. Quoted in Mark Muldoon, “Environmental Decline and Christian Contemplation,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 10(2) (2003), 82. 17. Muldoon, Interdisciplinary Studies, 83. 18. Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology, trans. Cyril Vollert (London: B. Herder Book Co., 1958), 157. Quoted in Muldoon, Interdisciplinary Studies, 85. 19. Ibid., 158. Quoted in Muldoon, Interdisciplinary Studies, 85. 20. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, trans. Thomas Gilby (London: Eyre & Spottliswoode and McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963), Ia.96.1. Quoted in Muldoon, Interdisciplinary Studies, 85. 21. C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (London: Lions, 1990), 17. 22. C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (London: Lions, 1990), 16. 23. Cf. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis. A Companion and Guide (London: Fount, 1996), 403. 24. Mar´ıa Jos´e de la Torre-Moreno, “Beyond Empowerment through Faith: Inversions and Contradictions in Narnia,” in Behind the Veil of Familiarity: C. S. Lewis

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(1898–1998), ed. Margarita Carretero-Gonz´alez and Encarnaci´on Hidalgo-Tenorio (Bern [Switzerland] and New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 251–252. 25. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (London: Lions, 1990), 106–107. 26. Ibid., 109. 27. Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain. Romantic Protest, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3. 28. Hooper, C. S. Lewis. A Companion and Guide, 425. 29. Ibid., 426. 30. C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (London: Lions, 1990), 64–65. 31. Ibid., 50. 32. Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, 45. 33. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 26. 34. Ibid., 26. 35. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 110. 36. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 61. 37. Ibid. 38. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Lions, 1990), 33. 39. In the Grimm Brothers’ account of the tale, Snow White is described as having “a skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony.” (J. L. C. Grimm and W. C. Grimm, “Snow White,” in Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1993), 215. Like Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, Kay is carried off by the “a woman, dressed in the finest white gauze, which appeared to be made of millions of starry flakes. She was delicately lovely, but all ice, glittering, dazzling ice” (Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen,” in Andersen’s Fairy Tales (Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1993), 185. The Snow Queen travels on a sledge and wraps the boy in her furs, as Jadis does with Edmund. 40. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 103. 41. Ibid., 71. 42. Ibid., 92. 43. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Lions, 1990), 7. 44. Ibid., 80. 45. Margarita Carretero-Gonz´alez, “Into the Wardrobe and Out of a Hobbithole: An Ecocritical Approach to C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien,” Studii de limbi ¸si literaturi moderne 1 (1999): 200. 46. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 158. 47. C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (London: Lions, 1990), 140. 48. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 16. 49. Ibid., 33–35. 50. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, 31. 51. Ibid., 33. 52. Ibid., 32.

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53. Ibid., 19. 54. Lewis, The Last Battle, 155–156. 55. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, 33. 56. Ibid., 91. 57. Quoted in Hooper, C. S. Lewis. A Companion and Guide, 579. 58. Ibid., 579. 59. Ibid., 580. 60. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 117. 61. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 129. 62. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 166. 63. Lewis, The Last Battle, 17. 64. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 50. It is tempting to establish a connection between the first Telmarine that invaded Narnia, Caspian the Conqueror, and the Duke of Normandy who, after defeating the Anglo-Saxons, became William the Conqueror, King of England, and imposed a new order on his territory. The defeated people were the remnants of those northern invaders whose culture so much fascinated C. S. Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien. 65. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 60. 66. Ibid., 52. 67. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 111. 68. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 171. 69. The reverence that Narnians hold for talking animals is clearly seen in the different ways in which Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum reacted when they became aware that they have eaten a talking stag. For Jill Pole, this was her first visit to Narnia, so she just felt “sorry for the poor stag and thought it rotten of the giants to have killed him.” Eustace, who had previously visited Narnia, felt “horrified” and compared it to murder, whereas Puddleglum “who was Narnian born, was sick and faint, and felt as you would feel if you found out you had eaten a baby” (Lewis, The Silver Chair, 104–105). 70. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 120. 71. Quoted in John Button, ¡H´aztelo verde!, trans. Jimmy Clark and Bego˜na Oliver (Barcelona, Spain: C´ırculo de Lectores, 1990), 242. 72. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 167. 73. Ibid., 180. 74. Ibid., 171. 75. From a letter written by J. R. R. Tolkien to his publishers on March 16, 1949 regarding the illustrations Miss Baynes had provided for his Father Giles of Ham. Quoted in Hooper, C. S. Lewis. A Companion and Guide, 406. 76. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 181. 77. Ibid., 181–182. 78. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, 130–131.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Snow Queen.” In Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1993, 183–212. Button, John. ¡H´aztelo Verde!. Translated by Jimmy Clark and Bego˜na Orive. Barcelona, Spain: C´ırculo de Lectores, 1990. Carpenter, Humphrey, J.R.R. Tolkien. A Biography. London: Grafton, 1992. Carretero-Gonz´alez, Margarita “Into the Wardrobe and Out of a Hobbit-hole: An Ecocritical Approach to C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” Studii de limbi ¸si literaturi moderne 1 (1999), 200–207. de la Torre-Moreno, Mar´ıa Jos´e. “Beyond Empowerment through Faith: Inversions and Contradictions in Narnia.” In Behind the Veil of Familiarity: C. S. Lewis (1898–1998). Edited by Margarita Carretero-Gonz´alez and Encarnaci´on Hidalgo-Tenorio Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2001, 251– 272. “Great Ape Project.” http://www.greatapeproject.org. Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl Grimm. “Snow White.” In Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1993, 215–224. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis. A Companion and Guide. London: Fount, 1996. Kowalsky, Nathan. “Anthropocentrism and Natural Suffering.” In The Range of Evil. Multidisciplinary Studies on Human Wickedness. Edited by William Myers. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2006, 63–74. (At http://www.interdisciplinary.net/publishing/idp/eBooks/roeindex.html.) Lewis, Clive Staples. The Horse and His Boy. London: Lions, 1990. ———. The Last Battle. London: Lions, 1990. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: Lions, 1990. ———. The Magician’s Nephew. London: Lions, 1990. ———. Prince Caspian. London: Lions, 1990. ———. The Problem of Pain. London: Fount, 1998. ———. The Silver Chair. London: Lions, 1990. ———. “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said.” In Of This and Other Worlds. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Fount, 1984, 71–75. ———. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. London: Lions, 1990. Muldoon, Mark. “Environmental Decline and Christian Contemplation.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 10(2) (2003), 75–96. Veldman, Meredith. Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain. Romantic Protest, 1945–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Cartography and Fantasy: Hidden Treasures in the Maps of The Chronicles of Narnia Marta Garc´ıa de la Puerta

The concept of a geographical context, minutely detailed, achieved not just through description, but by means of pictures and maps like those employed by C. S. Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia, is what makes fantastical works stand out from others, where the physical context of the story is usually either quite abstract or much less convincing than those that Lewis typically gives us. Therefore, the richly realized secondary world of Narnia is reinforced by the maps found in the seven Narnian Chronicles. Incorporating these maps into one’s work is one of the writer’s resources to add verisimilitude to his or her tales, to convince the reader of the “reality” of the place where the “extraordinary” events narrated take place. As Geoff King states, “maps have been used widely by writers of fiction to make their worlds more real.”1 It is true that, on one level, including maps and rich layeredness of these spaces undoubtedly makes the narrative more believable, while at the same time it adds the coherence necessary to elicit the reader’s voluntary suspension of disbelief. According to J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of subcreation (also shared by Lewis), the writer or subcreator should have the literary capacity required to create a secondary world which the reader may enter into as if under a spell. As Tolkien states, “Inside it what he relates is ‘true’ . . . The moment disbelief arises the spell is broken and the magic has failed.”2 This secondary

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world must be perfectly coherent not only with its own laws, myths, and cosmogony, but also with its geography and cartography. However, there is another no less important function, that of creating a geography of symbols for the reader to reinterpret. By this I mean how particular settings are visually organized, not simply as mere geographical features included in maps, but the clues provided that yield a much deeper meaning. According to Federica Dom´ınguez Colavita, “on this second level . . . fantasy spaces are the result of a symbolic-descriptive creation by the narrator which is completed by the reader.”3 From this viewpoint, each symbol, each setting, and each map image represents a set of information, which may be more or less explicit, provided by the author for the reader about a particular place, and the reader may use this information to reconstruct and reinterpret this space. There is thus a deeper level of interpretation elicited, a symbolic reading of the maps drawn of the secondary worlds the writer introduces. Thus, when we study the spaces and the maps belonging to The Chronicles of Narnia, we should not restrict ourselves to their descriptive value alone. Instead we should also study them as a means of expressing a triple reality: ideological, graphical, and geographical, in the same way that cartography was used in Ancient times, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. This was not the first time that Lewis had illustrated his stories with maps and pictures. As a child Lewis had played at making up stories and some of the maps of those faraway lands were already there. These stories were given the generic title “Animal Land,” and some maps of far-off lands appear sketched on them: “from history it was only a step to geography. There was soon a map of Animal Land—several maps, all tolerably consistent.”4 However, Lewis was a “doodler,” not a skilled artist, and his drawings could only provide suggestive models for a more proficient artist. Indeed, in his desire to create a world in physical detail with its particular geography, Lewis drew a map of Narnia that was never to appear in his texts. It was a very general map of Narnia and the lands that bordered it, and from it we can see that it was not finely sketched. Two types of shading may be seen, which are explained in the caption of the illustration. In one way this reveals Lewis’s inadequacies in drawing, which he was ready to admit himself: “what drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered.”5 His desire to evoke through map-making a detailed physical world, with a precision in its geography, instead required a professional artist to put the adventures of Narnia on paper; he chose the illustrator Pauline D. Baynes for this task. Baynes had already been entrusted the task of illustrating a fantasy tale by Tolkien, Farmer Giles of Ham (1949).6 It was Tolkien’s praise of the artist that decided Lewis to trust the maps and drawings for his Narnia books, under strict supervision, to the same person.7

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We should point out, however, that the cartographic illustrations of Narnia do not correspond to what we would regard as directional “maps” in the modern sense. Rather, the maps Lewis directed to be included in his fantasies resemble ancient, especially medieval maps. In Lewis’s own words: “My idea was that the map should be more like a medieval map than an Ordnance Survey—mountains and castles drawn—perhaps winds blowing at the corners—and a few heraldic-looking ships, whales and dolphins in a sea.”8 The maps imagined by Lewis, following medieval cartography, do not have any geometric precision or scientific representation. They are more like graphic illustrations and geographical metaphors. Indeed neither aim at reflecting reality exhaustively, and they are instead a symbolic portrayal whereby the artist deliberately highlights those features he is interested in, and leaving the rest sketchy. It must also be remembered that until the Renaissance we cannot talk about a clear distinction between painting and cartography.9 According to King: “Map-making and landscape painting were often the work of the same artists.”10 In the well-known Hereford world map, dating from the thirteenth century, one can see a mappaemundi featuring numerous rivers and several mountain ranges, and buildings span the surface; and at the top under Oriens, the Earthly Paradise can be seen with Adam and Eve at that critical moment of endangering everything for an apple.11 As Lewis explains in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, a glance at the Hereford mappemounde . . . suggests that . . . a map of the whole hemisphere on so small scale could never have been intended to have any practical use. The cartographer wished to make a rich jewel embodying the noble art of cosmography, with the Earthly Paradise marked as an island at the extreme Eastern edge. . . . Sailors themselves may have looked at it with admiration and delight. They were not going to steer by it.12

In Baynes’s Narnia maps, as in the medieval world maps Lewis used as models, there are no numeric references for longitude or latitude. In fact, we could probably extend King’s description of medieval maps to Lewis’s when he says that they “tended toward what we might now describe as an impressionistic depiction of features such as settlements and hills rather than claiming to be mathematically objective.”13 In medieval cartography it was typical to trace orography and hydrography, and this is a feature that Lewis recovers in his maps. The mountain ranges, hills, forests, rivers, deserts, gorges, swamps, islands, and even seabeds are clearly drawn; and in the forests we can even make out quite clearly different tree species, some with round tops and some elongated. But in addition to this, as Carlos Sanz points out in his compelling studies of antique world

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maps, in many medieval and Renaissance maps, there are buildings, funeral monuments, bridges, or ships on the seas that surround the coasts.14 Throughout the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, the world of the marvelous gained in importance, to the extent that it became an integral part of the view of the world. What was important to Europeans of the time was not to distinguish between the real and unreal (in the way they detected the sacred through that which was marvelous—since the essence of “discovery” was not in finding “new things”), but recognizing in reality what the imagination and tradition already held as true. The alleged existence of a continent in the unknown southern hemisphere posed the matter of its theoretical inhabitants, the antipodeans. According to Lewis, “the other hemisphere of the Earth was . . . wholly inaccessible. You could write science-fiction about it.”15 The variety of imaginary monsters (cyclops, unicorns, sciapodes, dragons, and griffons, etc.) was perceived as a normal “anomaly.” We can thus understand, as Kappler points out, the real and unreal consistency of the mythical creatures that appear on ancient maps.16 Having said that, it would be unfair to think that ancient map-making gave a simplistic vision of the world and universe. Some of the main cartography images were anything but an innocent view of the reality of the time, and the ideas derived from them were indispensable elements in order to interpret geographical reality by people centuries before. As David Woodward states, Medieval mappaemundi carry levels of meaning that have been widely misunderstood. Their compilers have been judged on their ability to show geographical reality structured according to a coordinate system, but the primary function of these maps was to provide illustrated histories or moralized, didactic displays in a geographical setting. . . . We need to evaluate the achievements of the Middle Ages on their own terms and in the context of their purpose.17

Maps were a universal model of expressing and conceiving the reality of a moment (both on a physical and human plane). This is why almost all societies had used them as a useful tool to represent the known world (and sometimes also the imagined world) and to create an ordered and institutionalized vision of the human surroundings (normally specific and real, at times distant and presumed). On the other hand, since geographical knowledge was limited at that time, the prospect of forming an image of the planet was a riskier enterprise than it would later become after circumnavigation of the earth. The process of broadening horizons encouraged the growth of a curious joining of fantasy and reality. Tales of sea voyages were evidence of the fact that mythical islands, monstrous races, and wonderful creatures really did exist. We must not forget that as time passed, the first to risk the dangerous sea journey to the Indies

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by the west, traversing the mysterious Atlantic Ocean, were driven by the hope to find the fabulous treasures, dreams, and marvels that were located on Far Eastern shores according to the long story-telling tradition. One only has to think of Marco Polo’s Travels (1295) or the book by John Mandeville, Marvels of the World (1356). And finally, the writers of the time, although not map makers, continued to contribute to a wealth of mental maps with religious visions, literary references, and true news of travelers and traders. During the Middle Ages, there was such credulity that fables, legends, and superstitions were fed and multiplied. According to Carlos Garc´ıa Gual, “this fantasy literature was thought up in a universe of dreams in the Middle Ages, which was credulous and anxious for fantasy and received gems and other extraordinary objects from the East that held ancient tales of marvels and exotic creatures.”18 When we study different samples of medieval and Renaissance maps, one frequently finds imaginary beasts and monstrous creatures, like those thought to have lived in the furthermost parts of the world: extraordinary beasts like dragons and whales, creatures with only one leg and foot, or one eye, or with no mouth, mermaids, the mythological Poseidon, and other anthropomorphic creatures. Indeed as Lewis himself says, a great deal of ancient geography is pure fantasy.19 In Abraham Ortelius’s map from 1595,20 for instance, there are images of fantastic creatures that remained in the imagination at that time.21 If we bear in mind Lewis’s fascination for this age, it is not surprising that he includes several mythical creatures taken directly from medieval and Renaissance cartography. If the shores of the Indian Ocean were home to all types of exotic fauna, monsters, and natural treasures for the medieval and Renaissance mentality, then the Great Eastern Ocean, with its enigmatic islands in the maps in The Chronicles of Narnia is the perfect dwelling for all type of wonders, including a large number of fantastic creatures. In the map drawn for The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”, for instance, the reader can see not only the islands where King Caspian’s boat traveled (Galma, Terebinthia, the Seven Islands, and the Lonely Islands), but also drawings of a wide variety of fantastic creatures. Most of these beings were taken from popular imagination and mythology, like the mythological Poseidon with his famous trident, a mermaid, three dwarves who live in the depths of the earth, the giants and gnomes drawn on the map in The Silver Chair, or the winged dragon drawn on a map in Prince Caspian. This great variety of creatures taken from diverse mythologies reflects Lewis’s interest in bringing together elements of different origin, which was common in the medieval mentality. This is what King explains in his brilliant study on map-making: “What might seem a strange combination of the geographical, the biblical and the

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pagan . . . is in fact a revealing chart of the heady mixture underlying medieval belief.”22 A constant preoccupation of travel writers during the Age of Discovery was that of making “marvels” from the lands they traveled known to the public. This is quite a normal attitude in the framework of any travel book text, be it real or fictional, from the Odyssey to the present day. Travel literature holds a special position in that there is a large body of mirabilia that has been built upon and extended since Ancient times, and as such was an authority to be borne in mind: either by quoting as an eyewitness, or including it in maps as we have pointed out. In the case of real travels, it was common for the travelers who decided to narrate their experiences to take elements of old traditions, and even decorate their journeys with a wide variety of marvels, natural portents, and diverse curiosities to strengthen the fabulous aspect of the places visited. Also, in order to highlight how incredible the mirabilia were to arouse the public curiosity and awe, travel writers use explicit textual markers that show the reality of the source of the writer’s amazement. One of the most frequent markers of subjective admiration is the use of the noun “marvel,” and its derivatives (“marvelous,” “to marvel”). Take for instance Christopher Columbus’s first impression on encountering the New World: “It is a very green and flat island . . . the greatest wonder in the world . . . the fish here are so different from ours it is marvelous . . . and with such fine colors, that no man alive can but marvel.”23 At times the adjective “strange” is used or on another level the clich´e of being indescribable (“it just cannot be described”). This may be applied to countries and regions, landscape, cities and buildings, customs, animals, climate, natural adversity, objects, and so on. Likewise, Lewis uses some of these textual markers in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a sea journey across The Great Eastern Ocean: “the Wonders of the Last Sea,”24 . . . “Then they could hear the voices of the party in the boat . . . talking in a shrill and surprised way,”25 . . .“Then up came the sun, and at its first rising they saw it through the wall and it turned into wonderful rainbow of colors.”26 The “unusual” is also brought to the fore when the main characters witness the “marvels” that astound them: “The faces of the ladies were filled with astonishment,”27 . . .“The whiteness did not get any less mysterious as they approached to it. If it was a land it must be a very strange land, for it seemed just as smooth as the water and on the same level with it.”28 A constant point of interest in the geography in medieval travel writing and which was to be recorded both in medieval and Lewis’s cartography is how particular privileged spaces are described, this being an essential aspect of what Olschi called ideological geography: spaces that belong to wonder, represented by fabulous islands at the end of the earth, an Earthly Paradise

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and in general any geographically marginal, and therefore, unknown area.29 According to Anca Crivat-Vasile, this “terra incognita” was organized around certain recurring coordinates: plentiful vegetation, fabulous riches in gold and gems, monsters and fantastic animals, lands of a scatological kind (an Earthly Paradise or, quite the opposite, spaces structured like Hell).30 On several occasions, these marvelous places were characterized by geographical features establishing the line between the land that had been explored and the unknown: a mountain or high range of mountains, a large rock, a desert, a chasm, thick forests, etc. Sometimes these lands were located near the sea or surrounded by it; perhaps this is why since Ancient times oceans and seas became the limit par excellence between the known and unknown world. A mysterious place that must be mentioned although it is not included in Narnia’s geographical borders is the “World’s End,” as it also marks the frontier between the known and unknown. Little is to be said about this place and it is one of the most enigmatic parts of The Chronicles of Narnia. Some locate it beyond the seas, where the known area supposedly ends and the real Narnia begins—that place Far East where death does not exist and spring and youth are eternal. Caspian missed no chance of questioning all the oldest sea captains whom he could find in Narrohaven to learn if they had any knowledge or even any rumors of land further east: “ . . . But those who seemed the most truthful could tell of no lands beyond the Lone Islands, and many thought that if you sailed too far east you would come into the surges of a sea without lands that swirled perpetually round the rim of the world.”31 Seen from the World’s End, Aslan’s World seems to consist of incredibly high mountains, which are always free of snow and covered by plants and forests as far as the eye can see. In The Last Battle, the last in the series of Narnia books, the idea of ascending to Aslan’s World is continually insisted on— accompanied by phrases like: “Narnia and the north!” and “Further up and further in!” Kappler explains that in the Middle Ages paradise on earth was also called a high point on earth: “to get there, one must ascend.”32 Taking the Middle Ages again as a source of inspiration to create an imaginary landscape, Lewis seems to have used this idea when he takes Aslan’s World as the highest point, and at its peak, for those who are able to reach it, is the most wonderful garden33 : “And soon they found themselves all walking together . . . up toward mountains higher than you could see. . . . But there was no snow on those mountains; there were forests and green slopes and sweet orchards and flashing waterfalls, one above the other, going up forever.”34 The image of Aslan’s World as a wonderful garden, like Eden—the closest thing to an Earthly Paradise in the Middle Ages—also entails Mircea Eliade’s mythical theme called “nostalgia for Paradise.”35 This nostalgia is present

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recurrently in art and human imagination: in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in the Garden of Hesperides, and also in the signs of Paradise that travelers like Marco Polo or Columbus discover: So these lands which he had now discovered were . . . the end of the East. . . . These grasses so green they seemed like river grasses. . . . the holy theologians and wise philosophers were right when they said that Earthly Paradise was at the end of the East, for it is a quite temperate place. . . . These are great signs of the Earthly Paradise, for this place are just as the holy, sacred theologians said. . . . Never have I heard nor read that such an amount of fresh water could be within and alongside salt water. . . . And if this is not from Heaven, it must be an even greater wonder.36

Another landscape feature that often appears in medieval and Renaissance travel writing, and which Lewis introduces in his work as pointed out below, is that of islands as a privileged land of marvels. Island motifs, for Europeans in the Middle Ages, were those territorial and geographical bastions, which offered one to be physically removed to a whole world of prodigious and fantastic creatures. Sailors in the sixteenth century believed in the existence of islands full of marvels and treasures such as The Island of the Seven Cities, Saint Brendan’s Island, or the Antilles, the fantastic island mentioned by Aristotle, which appeared in world maps as the furthest east of the lands of the Indies in the fourteenth century. This marvelous space, therefore, which has an ancient literary tradition, is revealed as one of the long preferred imaginary territories by humanity. We must only remember the islands inhabited by fantastic creatures in the Odyssey, the platonic Atlantis, with its great wealth of plant life and mines of precious metals, the island of Avalon in Celtic mythology, the marvelous islands of Saint Isidoro or the Hesiod’s Islands of the Blessed with their fertile soil that produces flowers and fruit three times a year. It is difficult to resist the temptation to give an exhaustive list of even the most important centers of tradition from before the Middle Ages in this regard, which has been significantly increased with cartography. In fact, medieval maps record the existence of unknown islands that were sought out from the end of the fifteenth century and during the sixteenth century in successive explorations. Cartography has, therefore, contributed quite a lot to encourage that “island romance” mentioned by Olschki, and his travel books echo this obsession with the dream of wealth combining that of the monstrous. This tradition of fabled islands with marvelous spaces, prodigious features, surprising creatures, and fantastical beasts also appears in the maps included in the Chronicles of Narnia. Like the sailors of olden times, the crew of the “Dawn Treader,” the vessel that sailed The Great Eastern Ocean in The Voyage

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of the “Dawn Treader,” were eager to discover unexplored territory and islands, places full of marvels and fantastic creatures recorded in Narnian tales: “wild stories of islands inhabited by headless men, floating islands, waterspouts, and a fire that burned along the water.”37 Islands that had been long yearned for, from what we can make out from the words of a sailor on the “Dawn Treader” when he glimpsed The Dark Island: “That’s the island I’ve been looking for this long time.”38 Islands inhabited by fantastic creatures such as the “sciapodes,” one- footed creatures that Lewis brought into his work, more than likely due to his knowledge of medieval literature. In his work, Kappler employs a quotation by Mandeville to describe these creatures as individuals with only one leg and one foot, which is so big that when they sit on the ground, they use it to protect them from the sun.39 As we can see, Lewis’s monopods are not very different from those described by Manderville or the one included in the map of the world by Beato del Burgo de Osma, which describes a fourth continent, unknown territory, as a place of extreme heat where the sciapode lives—a naked creature with long hair and a leg ending in a large foot.40 There are other analogies with ancient maps that cannot go unnoticed in The Chronicles of Narnia. As far as medieval maps are concerned, the intention was not to include all geographical knowledge, but as Kappler explains, “to propose a selection of places to make up a painting.”41 This is why a lot of old maps show particular aspects and scenes from social and political life in the Middle Ages. Therefore, what might now seem anachronistic represents a social, economic, political, and religious organization, which reigned for more than ten centuries after the fall of Rome. To quote Woodward, “the mappaemundi show that maps may also consist of historical aggregations or cumulative inventories of events in addition to representing objects that exist cosynchronously in space.”42 To take one example, the Catalan Atlas, attributed to Abraham de Cresques, shows a myriad of people, animals, walled cities, and characteristic objects from these places that aimed to show what the people who lived in that region were like.43 If we compare this map dating from 1375 with Lewis’s map for The Horse and His Boy, we can see the intention was to reflect very specific aspects of life in the kingdom of Calormen. There, human and beasts work in slavery under the control of the Taarkans, the masters in whose hands the administrative power of the kingdom lies. We also notice the presence of lords and ladies of Tashbaan, who are carried on stretchers. In the Middle Ages, meanwhile, if we study the typical iconography and symbolism, we see that maps and images of the Cosmos are full of images that aim to transmit abstract truths symbolically. Geometric and nongeometric

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shapes, spatial fields, colors, predominant axes, and other enigmatic figures and images provide us with a very particular vision of the world: they were efficient vehicles for the transmission of certain world-views. They were accurate charts of the beliefs of their time. . . . The cartographic image became a multivalent symbol capable of expressing a host of different moral and religious meanings.44

When compared with medieval maps it becomes clear that Lewis had this iconography in mind when making his own. His maps, like medieval maps, were not meant to be mathematically objective or aseptic. They are more a mixture of geographical enclaves and symbolism: there are iconographic elements, symbols, and images reflecting a deeper conceptual line of thought. According to Mallarm´e, the world is conceived as something to end up in a beautiful book, or, in my opinion, to be turned into a map marked out by evocative symbols. It should thus be noted that the Narnia maps have a symbolic image (that of the quaternary), which not only shows the four cardinal points, but also reflects the double structuring of the medieval spirit, as in the circular shape included in the map drawn for The Silver Chair. It is circular and vertical at the same time, an image that represents the spiritual (a circle, sphere, and a rose window) and the material or manifest (the cross). Gerard Champeaux and Dom Sterckx, in their study on medieval art symbols, describe the quaternary circle as a cross inside a circular border, from which we can make out a type of radiation from the four cardinal points. The quaternary may be subdivided in eight, twelve, sixteen, etc. thus forming a compass. According to these authors, this process announces and carries out the passing from the transcendent beyond to the imminent down here.45 This symbolism is a geometric representation of the close interdependence that exists between the two worlds, the transcendental and the supratemporal (the Land of Aslan) and the earthly, contingent, and limited (Narnia). The heavenly and supratemporal (the circle) becomes a whole with the earthly, plotting the landscape where life of the Narnia creatures goes on (vertical and horizontal lines), as in the circular shape included in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” According to Juan Eduardo Cirlot, however, the cross is a dramatic derivation, like an inversion of the tree in paradise in medieval iconography. This is why, in his opinion, the cross is often seen as a knotted tree, even with branches, sometimes Y-shaped, and sometimes thorny. This is what happens in the Tree of Life, the cross is the “axis of the world.” It is situated in the mystical center of the cosmos, and is the bridge or stairs whereby souls go up to God.”46 It is interesting if we look carefully at the circular shape in the map Lewis made for The Silver Chair; there are Y-shaped branches of what could

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be the Tree of Life inside the vertical and horizontal axes of the cross. In other words, the tree of paradise planted at the beginning of time and remaining till the end of time: the Yggdrasil or Tree of Ashes from Scandinavian peoples, which Lewis himself mentions in the American edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.47 Therefore, the cross as axis of the world establishes the primary relationship between two worlds: the material, and the spiritual. There is another image that allows us to see more similarities between ancient maps and those in The Chronicles of Narnia. This is the graphic image of the cyclical passing of time, using figures like the Moon and the Sun. These are drawn at either side of the axis of the world on the top left edge of the map in this same illustration, and symbolize the counting of time, as in medieval maps, as each one rises and sets. As the sun rises and sets each day, bringing with it the changes in light and darkness, heat and cold, it has a far-reaching effect on the world of Narnia. The circle turns into a wheel, which rotates producing cycles, repetitions, and renewals. Another motif often appearing in ancient maps and which Lewis undoubtedly brings into his is the image of the four elements of nature. A detailed study of the left side of the map in Prince Caspian reveals this: earth on the inside, drops of water and flames flank the outside, and a symbol for air in the anthropomorphic figure of the wind. Cirlot believes there is a relation between the elements and those called “elemental.” These correspond, according to this author, as follows: air (sylphs and giants); fire (the salamander); water (nymphs or mermaids); earth (gnomes or dwarves).”48 In Lewis’s fantasy literature, the presence of elemental beings on three maps (giants, dwarves, a mermaid, and a dragon) may reflect his intention to represent the four elements (earth, air, water, and fire). In the maps drawn for The Chronicles of Narnia, we can also observe Renaissance influence. As Lewis states: For the Renaissance thinker, not less but more than for the schoolman, the universe was packed and tingling with anthropomorphic life; its true picture is to be found in the elaborate title pages of old folios where wind blows at the corners and at the bottom dolphins spout.49

In fact we can find several details mentioned above in all the maps. In the map drawn for Prince Caspian, for example, we can see several dolphins and the anthropomorphic image of the wind as a head blowing. The other maps also include, as already stated, a wide variety of fantastic animals and anthropomorphic creatures like those seen in many maps of the time. In addition, maps from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were usually highly decorated with ships, sea creatures, figures, and rose compasses with a lily pointing north, and these elements are plentiful in almost all the maps in The Chronicles of Narnia.50 As regards ornamentation, the name of the maps

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of this time (and this custom was maintained until much later) was usually decorated, surrounded by mythological figures, anthropomorphic creatures, or floral motifs. Lewis also adopts this in some of his maps, such as the anthropomorphic figure of the wind that surrounds the map in Prince Caspian, the mermaid at the top of the map in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the giants that hold up the name of the map in The Silver Chair, or the compass rose that appears in the maps in The Chronicles of Narnia. The wind rose or compass rose has appeared on charts and maps since the 1300s when the portolan charts first made their appearance to help orient readers.51 Originally, this device was used to indicate the main directions according to the most important winds: the eight major winds, the eight half-winds, and the sixteen quarter-winds. North has traditionally been indicated with a “fleur de lys” symbol. In portolan charts the directions, made by lengthening the angles of a central rose, crossed with those of another surrounding it, made up a dense network of thirty-two directions. These direction lines linked ports of arrival with ports of departure. Albino Canepa’s portolan chart is a magnificent example excellently outlining the Mediterranean Basin and providing notable information on the Atlantic, showing the islands (Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries) as well as some fantasy islands, of which Antilia is worthy of note (situated to the west of Azores).52 This same technique is observed in some of the maps for The Chronicles of Narnia, which outlines the coast quite accurately and gives information about some lands and inland settlements. The approach is quite eclectic, so traditions from fantasy are used as well as “data” from observations. Looking carefully at the two maps drawn for The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” and Prince Caspian, a network of straight lines can be seen which are the result of prolonging the directions of a rose compass, sixteen and thirty-two rhumb lines respectively. The three maps introduce, as in ancient portolan charts, all their traditional ornamentation, such as the “fleur de lis” symbol pointing north, ships, coastal names, and numerous hydrographic and topographic references. The two maps drawn for The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” also show the rhumb lines that indicate the point of arrival and departure of the vessels, some coastal features, the places where sailors would shelter, and, in one of the maps, the distances are also recorded—all of these being characteristic features of portolan charts. Taking all this into account, we cannot overlook another function of the maps in Lewis’s fantasy literature and which coincides, to a great degree, with some Italian Renaissance painters: the use of a landscape background to support a moral allegory. As James Hall explains, the “moralized” scenery of some Renaissance paintings “may show a clear sky in half the painting in

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contrast to the black clouds in the other half: both Good and Evil are reflected close up.”53 The landscape in the maps of Narnia, as well as the creatures and some objects, also seem to have taken a moral standing. We might say that these secondary worlds reflected on the maps are a huge chessboard where the struggle between Good and Evil is played out. The scenery does indeed reflect to a point the ethics of the creatures that live there. When we study the maps in Lewis’s work, we see that the lands inhabited by the good creatures have abundant vegetation and forests. The areas inhabited by malignant creatures are the complete opposite. There all kinds of evil creatures dwell and they are described as arid places, with hardly any rivers, and usually freeze. This is all in consonance with the text. Narnia, unlike Archenland or Calormen, is characterized by its plentiful forests, valleys, and rivers that run throughout the land. The green spaces are a symbol of life and wealth, and a place where its inhabitants dwell and take refuge. During what was known as the “Golden Age of Narnia,” this natural environment represented a space for happiness for its inhabitants—allies of Good: “all the animals could talk, and there were nice people who lived in the streams and the trees. Naiads and Dryads they were called. And there were Dwarfs: And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods.”54 The Kingdom of Narnia could even evoke the mythical gardens of Eden. Far from being a hostile environment, nature here appears to be close to the creatures, and even beats to the same life rhythm. It is a refuge for creatures of peace, a stage for celebrations and “cosmic” dances, and a place of hushed conversation. The forests, valleys, and rivers of Narnia in some way turned into a prolongation of the character of its owners and thus take on the most diverse shapes, ranging from Baco’s “laughing” games and his court of fauns and satyrs in times of peace and happiness, to the endless winter that covered the forests of Narnia in snow for a hundred long years, reflecting the perturbed mind of the White Witch. In this natural environment with open spaces, places are described where the vegetation looks like it has been tamed neither directly nor indirectly by human intervention. This is why it becomes a threatening reality for the Telmarines or “New Narnians,” the people who after conquering Narnia in 1998—that is, according to Narnian chronology55 —set themselves the first measure of cutting down the highest number of trees possible in order to control these spaces, silence the beasts, and rid themselves of a presence they felt was threatening.56 What Lewis suggests is, undoubtedly, a new relationship between man and his environment—that of reason and nature joined. The image that perhaps best reflects this idea is that of the hamadryad or nymph of the trees, whose spirit dies when the tree she dwells in is cut down.

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In contrast to the idealized image of nature presented in its purest state in Ancient Narnia, Calormen appears as an extremely arid and clearly domesticated land. While Narnia is characterized by its plentiful open natural spaces, Tashbaan, the capital of Calormen is described as a city surrounded by an extremely high wall permanently guarded by soldiers. Even the gardens are subject to geometrical reason and discipline between the walls. Inside the city walls a hill covered in buildings stretches out to the top. The population gathers in the markets and trips over huge piles of rubbish all over the streets. While in Narnia there are hardly any buildings, Tashbaan surprises us with its great number of palaces, narrow streets, and slums where the people are crowded. Here, the two blocks of spaces we see are divided into natural and artificial, and are irreconcilably separate. The city of Tashbaan is an artificial place that also has clearly negative connotations both for the neighbors in Archenland and the inhabitants of Narnia, as historically it was an aggressive country that had always tried to conquer the free lands in the north. Quite the opposite to Narnia, and also with negative connotations, is the land occupied by the giants of Harfang, to the north of Narnia. In The Silver Chair, Jill Pole, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum could clearly see the contrast between the two spaces before leaving for the Wild Lands of the North to search for Prince Rilian: “They found a place where they could scramble up, and in about ten minutes stood panting at the top. They cast a longing look back at the valley-land of Narnia and then turned their faces to the North. The vast, lonely moor stretched on and up as far as they could see. On their left was rockier ground. . . . As they got deeper the moor, the loneliness increased.”57 Moreover, if we look carefully at the map in Prince Caspian, this feeling, and with it the negative connotation, grows as we move north, where the cliffs and permanently frozen landscape that is battered by the north winds, turn the land of the giants into a space that is bare of vegetation and progressively more dangerous and threatening. Lewis thus organizes spaces around two different atmospheres: a natural one, on the one hand, and, on the other, the tamed or artificial (that is, towns or cities). In The Chronicles of Narnia we may consider this a gross simplification of dividing spaces into hostile and protecting, and the positive or negative connotations of each space vary according to the characters that occupy them. But Lewis does not just use words, as we have already seen; he also uses maps to show this. Fernando Savater’s words on Tolkien’s fantasy literature also come to mind, and may be extended to include Lewis, when he says that the ethical condition pervades everything and “all physical laws submit to the supreme Law of moral courage.”58 This tendency to endow every space, every landscape with great meaning is in subtle but powerful contrast to the apparently naturalistic

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descriptive approach in the narration, transforming “realism” into something that is essentially magic. But this is the very reason why the leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary is made in the fantasy literature of Lewis without even startling us. To conclude, we might say that to create a detailed geographical context, Lewis relies not only on words, but he also uses drawings and maps like those included in his fantasy work, which is another of his resources that contributes to the internal coherence of his work and to greater credibility, essential requirements when creating secondary worlds. Including maps or, that is, graphically showing the place where the events narrated occur, is one of the writer’s resources to add veracity to a story. One of the points we have highlighted here, however, is that the maps in The Chronicles of Narnia do not correspond to what we would normally understand by modern-day cartography. The maps that appear in editions of the series are much closer to medieval or Renaissance charts. In fact, if we compare the maps of Narnia with older cartography, it is clear that there are several elements from medieval and Renaissance imagination, such as marvels and treasures, beasts and monsters, mythical creatures, and other fabled creatures. The most typical imagery in medieval maps, in particular, is a clearly visible influence in Lewis when designing maps for the series of works on Narnia. These maps, like the world maps and medieval charts, were not conceived with scientific or objective rigor, but rather the graphic representation of a constellation of ideas. So it is that the images, symbols, and other elements in these maps, instead of being merely decorative, have meaning and symbolize something—something specific or something profound to a greater or lesser degree. There remains no doubt, then, that Lewis had the medieval and Renaissance very much in mind when he imagined and developed the maps to be included in some of his fantasy books. He was fascinated by the time when the great Thule, the furthermost region according to the classics, was still believed in and he introduced symbols, images, and fantastic creatures just like the map makers of the time. His maps might be considered, among other things, a tribute to medieval and Renaissance cartography. NOTES 1. Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 21. 2. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Grafton, 1992), 36. 3. Federica Dom´ınguez Colavita, Teor´ıa del cuento infantil (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Plus Ultra, 1990), 135.

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4. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955), 17. For more details, see Walter Hooper, Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985). 5. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 17. 6. Years later Pauline D. Baynes would also illustrate for this author The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and Smith of Wooton Major (1967). 7. Walter Hooper, ed. C. S. Lewis. A Companion and Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 624–625. The maps that illustrate the text The Chronicles of Narnia only appear in Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy. The first of these maps is of Narnia and the surrounding lands and it includes part of the Wild Lands to the North and Archenland to the South. The map that appears in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” shows the first part of the Great Ocean of the East, including the Seven Islands, the Lonely Islands, and the Great Eastern Islands. In The Silver Chair there is a map of the Wild Lands of the North, and in The Horse and His Boy Archenland and the desert that joins it to the warm lands of Calormen is portrayed. 8. Ibid., 625. 9. The transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was reflected in a significant change in cartography. The development of mathematics coincided with that of cartography. 10. King, Mapping Reality, 23. 11. Cf. http://www.herefordwebpages.co.uk/mapmundi.shtml (Last accessed August 20, 2006) 12. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143–144. 13. King, Mapping Reality, 44. 14. Cf. Carlos Sanz, Mapas antiguos del mundo (siglos XV-XVI) (Madrid, Spain: Gr´aficas Yag¨ue, 1961). 15. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 142. 16. Claude Kappler, Monstruos, demonios y maravillas a fines de la Edad Media (Madrid, Spain: Akal, 1986), 42. 17. David Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985), 510. 18. Carlos Garc´ıa Gual, “Imagen m´ıtica del Nuevo Mundo,” in Siglo XV (Sevilla, Spain: Sociedad Estatal para la Exposici´on Universal, 1992), 155. 19. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 77. 20. Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terraru, facsimile edn, no. 560 (Firenze, Italy: Giunti, 1991). 21. Annalisa Battini, “Gli del cinquecento mercatore e la cartograf´ıa moderna,” in Alla Scoperta del Mondo, ed. E. Milano, (Modena, Italy: Il Bulino, 2001), 191.

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22. King, Mapping Reality, 32. 23. Luis Arranz, ed., Cristobal Col´on: Diario de abordo (Madrid, Spain: Historia 16, 1991), 99. Christopher Columbus was accompanied by the young Fray Bartolom´e de Las Casas, who would later provide partial transcripts of Columbus’s logs. 24. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” Illustrated by Pauline Baynes (New York: Harper Trophy, 1994), 218. 25. Ibid., 235. 26. Ibid., 242. 27. Ibid., 225. 28. Ibid., 234. 29. Leonardo Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche: Studi e ricerche (Firenze, Italy: 1937), 147. 30. Anca Crivat-Vasile, “Mirabilis Oriens: fuentes y transmission,” in Revista de Filolog´ıa Rom´anica, 11–12. (1994–1995), 471. 31. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” 64. 32. Claude Kappler, Monstruos, demonios y maravillas a fines de la Edad Media, 23. 33. The Holy Mountain in Perelandra, like the peak of the mountain in Aslan’s World in The Last Battle, is also associated to the idea of spiritual elevation. According to Olivier Beigbeder “the throne of divinity is sometimes found at the peak of a cosmic mountain; . . . the mountain is the link between heaven and earth.” [Olivier Beigbeder, La simbolog´ıa (Barcelona, Spain: Oikos-tan, 1971), 42.] The hill, therefore, might be said to give up its earthly or material character becoming an image of an idea which seems to have become fact in the work of Lewis (“myth became fact”). 34. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes (New York: HarperTrophy, 1994), 209. 35. Mirecea Eliade, Mito y realidad, 2nd ed. (Barcelona, Spain: Labor, 1994), 181. 36. Luis Arranz, ed. Cristobal Col´on: Diario de abordo (Madrid, Spain: Historia 16, 1991), 53–54. 37. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” 64–65. 38. Ibid., 183. 39. Claude Kappler, Monstruos, demonios y maravillas a fines de la Edad Media, 1986, 143. 40. Cf. http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/EMwebpages/207H.html (Last accessed August 20, 2006). 41. Kappler, Monstruos, demonios y maravillas a fines de la Edad Media, 88. 42. Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” 510. 43 . Cf. http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/LMwebpages/246B.html (Last accessed August 20, 2006) 44. King, Mapping Reality, 31–32.

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45. Gerard Champeaux and Dom S´ebastien Sterckx, Introducci´on a los s´ımbolos, 3rd ed. (Madrid, Spain: Encuentro, 1992), 40. 46. Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Diccionario de S´ımbolos, 2nd ed. (Madrid, Spain: Siruela, 1997), 157. 47. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Illustrated by Pauline Baynes (New York: Harper Trophy, 1994), 138. In the Edda by Sorri Sturluson, the great tree Yggdrasil or tree of ashes symbolizes the unchanging cosmos. As an expression of the cosmos, it is at the same time, the center of life, and the center of everything. 48. Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Diccionario de S´ımbolos, 2nd ed. (Madrid, Spain: Siruela, 1997), 162. 49. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 75. 50. Jos´e Luis Casado Soto, “El descubrimiento del mundo 1500–1630,” in La Imagen del Mundo: 500 A˜nos de Cartograf´ıa, Madrid, Spain: Instituto Geogr´afico Nacional, 1992, 56–116, 105. 51. The portolan chart is a hand-drawn navigational chart made in Mediterranean ports and used by Mediterranean sailors from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth century and characterized by a grid of intersecting rhumb lines (or loxodromes) and scalloped coastlines with the names of ports of landmarks and ports written at right angles to the coast. 52. Cf. http://www.bell.lib.umn.edu/map/PORTO/CAN/index89.html (Last accessed August 20, 2006). 53. James Hall, Diccionario de temas y s´ımbolos art´ısticos (Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial, 1987), 243. 54. C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, Illustrated by Pauline Baynes (New York: Harper Trophy, 1994), 42. 55. Walter Hooper, ed. Past Watchful Dragons. A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1980), 82. 56. Lewis, 51. 57. Lewis, The Silver Chair, Illlustrated by Pauline Baynes (New York: HarperTrophy, 1994), 79. 58. Fernando Savater, La infancia recuperada (Madrid, Spain: Taurus, 1986), 141. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arranz, Luis, Editor. Cristobal Col´on. Diario de abordo. Madrid, Spain: Historia 16, 1991. Battini, Annalisa. “Gli del cinquecento mercatore e la cartograf´ıa moderna”. In Alla Scoperta del Mondo. Modena. Edited by E. Milano. Modena, Italy: Il Bulino, 2001, 171–239.

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Beigbeder, Olivier. La simbolog´ıa. Barcelona, Spain: Oikos-tan, 1971. Carretero Gonz´alez, Margarita and Encarnaci´on Hidalgo Tenorio, Editors. Behind the Veil of Familiarity: C. S. Lewis (1898–1998). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2001. Casado Soto, Jos´e Luis. “El descubrimiento del mundo, 1500–1630.” In La Imagen del Mundo: 500 A˜nos de Cartograf´ıa,. Madrid, Spain: Instituto Geogr´afico Nacional, 1992, 56–116 Champeaux Gerard and Dom S´ebastien Sterckx. Introducci´on a los s´ımbolos. 3rd ed. Madrid, Spain: Encuentro, 1992. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. Diccionario de S´ımbolos. 2nd ed. Madrid, Spain: Siruela, 1997. Crivat-Vasile, Anca. “Mirabilis Oriens: fuentes y transmisi´on.” Revista de Filolog´ıa Rom´anica (1994–1995): 471–479, 11–12 De cresques, Abraham. Mapamundi del A˜no 1375. Barcelona, Argentina: Ebrisa, 1983. Dom´ınguez Colavita, Federica. Teor´ıa del cuento infantil. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Plus Ultra, 1990. Eliade, Mirecea. Mito y realidad. 2nd. ed. Barcelona, Argentina: Labor, 1994. Garc´ıa Gual, Carlos. “Imagen m´ıtica del Nuevo Mundo.” In Siglo XV Sevilla: Sociedad Estatal para la Exposici´on Universal, 1992, 152–161. Hall, James. Diccionario de temas y s´ımbolos art´ısticos. Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial, 1987. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis. A Companion and Guide. London: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. Past Watchful Dragons. A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. London: Fount Paperbacks, 1980. ———. ed. Boxen. The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Kappler, Claude. Monstruos, demonios y maravillas a fines de la Edad Media. Madrid, Spain: Akal, 1986. Kilby, Clyde S. Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1978. King, Geoff. Mapping Reality. An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies. London: Macmillan Press, 1996. Lewis, Clive Staples. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. The Cosmic Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Great Britain: Pan Books, 1989. ———. The Discarded Image. An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. The Horse and His Boy. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. New York: Harper Trophy, 1994. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A Story for Children. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. New York: Harper Trophy, 1994.

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———. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. ———. Prince Caspian. The Return to Narnia. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. New York: Harper Trophy, 1994. ———. The Silver Chair. lllustrated by Pauline Baynes. New York: Harper Trophy, 1994. ———. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. New York: Harper Trophy, 1994. Mart´ın Meras, M. Luisa. “De los portulanos al padr´on de Indias.” In La imagen del mundo. 5OO A˜nos de Cartograf´ıa. Madrid, Spain: Instituto Geogr´afico Nacional, 1992, 13–54. Olschki, Leonardo. Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche. Studi e ricerche. Italy: Firenze, 1937. Ortelius, Abraham. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Firenze, Italy: Giunti, (Facsimile edn, no. 560), 1991. Sanz, Carlos. Mapas antiguos del mundo (siglos XV–XVI). Madrid, Spain: Gr´aficas Yag¨ue, 1961. Savater, Fernando. La infancia recuperada. Madrid, Spain: Taurus, 1986. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tree and Leaf. London: Grafton, 1992. Woodward, David. “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps.” In Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985), 510–521.

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Till We Have Faces: A Study of the Soul and the Self Karen Rowe

Each reader may be able to come up with a unique reading of C. S. Lewis’s last novel, Till We Have Faces, but there are, nevertheless, certain themes which can serve as instructional starting points for someone reading this work for the first—or fifth—time. One thing, at least, is certain: the more one reads Lewis’s complex novel, the more one finds rewards for doing so. Placing the work in the context of Lewis’s life and other works helps one see it as the culmination of his literary mythmaking and his lifelong search for joy and God. Chronologically speaking, Till We Have Faces follows his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and has the distinction of being Lewis’s last novel. Walter Hooper states that the work was begun in the spring of 1955 while Surprised by Joy was still presumably in production. Joy Davidman Gresham, Lewis’s fan, friend, and soon-to-be wife, was making regular visits to him that year. Apparently the two worked on ideas for a story: a letter by Joy on March 23 records that their conversation that day bore fruit for the novel, which was then well underway by the end of April. Hooper records that a further letter to Bill Gresham has Joy remarking that “he [Lewis] finds my advice indispensable.”1 The influence of the future Mrs. Lewis was remarkable in many ways, not the least of which was an intellect and love of argument and learning comparable to Lewis’s.

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But in fact, Lewis had actually started the novel much earlier in life. In the initial British publication of the novel, Lewis writes: This re-interpretation of an old story has lived in the author’s mind, thickening and hardening with the years, ever since he was an undergraduate. That way, he could be said to have worked at it most of his life. Recently, what seemed to be the right form presented itself and themes suddenly interlocked: the straight tale of barbarism, the mind of an ugly woman, dark idolatry and pale enlightenment at war with each other and with vision, and the havoc which a vocation, or even a faith, works on human life.2

Lewis records this initial consideration of the idea on November 23, 1922: “After lunch I went out for a walk up Shotover, thinking how to make a masque or play of Psyche and Caspian.”3 He records nearly a year later, on September 9, 1923: “My head was very full of my old idea of a poem on my own version of the Cupid and Psyche story in which Psyche’s sister would not be jealous, but unable to see anything but moors when Psyche showed her the Palace. I have tried it twice before, once in couplet and once in ballad form.”4 Hooper records these fragmentary versions, copied out by Lewis’s brother, in C. S. Lewis: Companion & Guide.5 These efforts, as well as the changes already intended in the retelling of the myth (both using Caspian rather than Orual and changing the motivation of the sister), reveal that Lewis had in mind the fundamental alteration that would make the novel more mythic than the original telling, for it is the introduction of the aspect of belief that allows the numinous quality of true myth to emerge. That the novel comes on the heels of Surprised by Joy is perhaps no accident, for in that autobiographical work, Lewis addresses the lifelong search for what he calls “Joy,” or Sehnsucht a nameless longing for something nearly inexplicable, a dream that dissipates as soon as one imagines he has grasped it, the almost tangible expression of an emotion, an encounter with the eternal likened always in his works to a “stab,” sharp and painful in its brevity and intensity. This longing for something which he first associates with natural beauty, then with the Norse legends, and then in scattered moments throughout his life is actually the thing itself which he longs for; the “wanting,” not the having, is the “Joy.” He learns that the more he pursues the Stab, the less he can encounter it, but the more he turns his attention to other things, the more likely it is that he will experience the sharp longing again. This indirect way of obtaining what one desires above all else is what the main character of Till We Have Faces comes to experience in the culmination of both her journey of self-discovery (much like Lewis’s) and her transformation. The closer she binds those she loves to her, the less love she feels. Lewis wrote The Four Loves after Till We Have Faces. In essence, The Four Loves can be read as a commentary on the novel, as it is a study of the nature of

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Love in its four manifestations—Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity— and offers an indirect analysis of the failure of the novel’s main character to love properly those she is surrounded by. Lewis’s grist for the analytical mill, which is The Four Loves, undoubtedly arose from not only a lifetime of personal interactions demanding various types of love from him (and encountering many wrong loves for him), but also from the extended analogy on love which Till We Have Faces can be considered. Working backward from fiction to analysis is not unheard of. In this case showing precedes telling. In The Four Loves, Lewis first addresses the two distinct natures of Love: Need-love and Gift-love. Need-love, of course, is the love that looks at others always in relation to the interests of the lover. Here is the obsessive love of a mother for a child; the self-centered love of a husband for a wife, who becomes his cook, maid, and mate; the fulfilling love of a spinster teacher for her pupils. Here is the possessive love of a wife demanding all her husband’s time, the alienating love of a grieving parent at the expense of a living child, the controlling love of a pastor over his flock. These examples of Need-love all reveal a love conditioned by the needs of the lover, not the needs of the loved one. On the other hand is Gift-love, which considers the needs of the loved one even at the expense of the lover. Lewis experienced both of these loves in his life. His father, unable to bear the death of his wife, found it nearly impossible to have a relationship with his sons. Lewis, on the other hand, because of his father’s overbearing manner, found it nearly impossible to build a relationship with his father. The mother of his wartime friend, Paddy Moore, to whom Lewis pledged he would care for after her son’s death, showed Lewis the agonies of a possessive love that controls not just the object of love, but all those surrounding it. Lewis demonstrated Gift-love in the thirty-year sacrifice of time, money, leisure, and emotion toward Mrs. Moore as well as in a lifetime of care for Warnie, his brother. In his love for Joy Gresham, Lewis experienced his friend Charles Williams’ idea of substitutionary suffering as he himself lost bone mass to osteoporosis while Joy gained bone mass in her leg. Thus, Lewis’s portrayal in Till We Have Faces of Orual’s slow realization of her overwhelming Need-love for all those around her and the damage it does evidences an understanding from personal experience. A reader familiar with other works of Lewis’s will detect similarities between them and his Till We Have Faces. There are elements of Narnia in the novel, most recognizably in the vision sequence where Orual walks into the vision through a picture, just as Lucy and Eustace Clarence Scrubb enter Narnia through the painting of the ship in Prince Caspian. And some might see in the unveiling of Orual at the judgment bar of the gods a similarity to the tearing off of Scrubb’s dragon skin, acquired because of the dragon-longings in his

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heart. Orual, too, has longings that evidence themselves in her outer form, though she takes the veil voluntarily. Additionally, the description of the god’s valley in Till We Have Faces reads very much like the description of the true Narnia in The Last Battle. Certainly the influence of the Great Knock, Lewis’ tutor, who marshaled his abilities in reason, is clearly present in the logic of both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which Peter and Susan worry over Lucy’s mental state, and Till We Have Faces, in which Orual seeks an explanation for Psyche’s condition. This logic—whether Psyche, like Lucy, is known for lying—fails to govern Orual’s attempts both to fathom who Psyche’s lover is and then to win Psyche’s obedience. As a result of this failure, the well-known “trichotomy” options presented by Lewis in Mere Christianity that Christ is either a liar, a lunatic, or the Son of God, are much like the choices Orual considers for the identity of Psyche’s husband: he is either a robber, a murderer, or a god. Since Orual is unwilling to accept Psyche as truthful, it is completely unthinkable for Psyche to remain with either a robber or a murderer. In another reference, we have the words of the Ungit priest in Till We Have Faces about the nature of “holy wisdom . . . not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood”6 echoing Lewis’s description of kinds of religion [as being “thick” and “clear”] in his essay “Christian Apologetics.”7 Kelli Brew notes the similarities in the figurative masking of the characters in That Hideous Strength with Orual’s literal veiling of herself as a power play in Till We Have Faces.8 In these limited ways, and in others, Till We Have Faces draws together many threads of Lewis’s ideas and beliefs more explicitly stated in other works. In the novel, however, he weaves them naturally into the story, not as individual ideas, but as ideas in action. One is encouraged then to see the ideas as a natural part of humanity’s thinking, rather like vocabulary words linked together into literature. The reader’s attention is drawn to few of these ideas in isolation, but an awareness of their presence in other works is richly rewarded. THE MYTH AND C. S. LEWIS Throughout Surprised by Joy, Lewis returns repeatedly to the role that myths played in his life, which were tied to his love of literature, music, and ultimately of God, for it was through myth that he first felt the stab of Joy, which he found had its source in God. Lewis explains in his autobiography that he “desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described . . . and then . . . [I] found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.”9 He also recounts the effects an encounter with “northernness” and Teutonic myth had on him in Surprised by Joy:

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the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss. . . . And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.10

For Lewis, he felt an ecstasy in which there “were moments when you were too happy to speak, when the gods and heroes rioted through your head, when satyrs danced and Maenads roared on the mountains, when Brynhild and Sieglinde, Deirdre, Maeve and Helen were all about you, till sometimes you felt that it might break you with mere richness.”11 Lewis’s own words communicate the power that myth had over him, and so it is no surprise that he would see myth as a powerful vehicle for his own fiction. It was in myth that Lewis found the signpost to Christianity, seeing in the pagan stories the shadow of the true myth of Christianity, or as Lewis says, “The real clue had been put into my hand by that hard-boiled Atheist when he said, ‘Rum thing, all that about the Dying God. Seems to have really happened once.’”12 A deep and moving love of the “copy” had made him consider it worthwhile to seek out the “original.” This lifelong love of myth was the perfect impetus for Lewis’s own fiction. While many people consider a myth to be merely a grown-up fairy tale, Lewis was careful in An Experiment in Criticism to define the genre. Some of the characteristics of myth, Lewis said, are these: (1) it is greater than the vehicle that tells it; (2) it has little reliance on the common literary elements tools such as suspense or surprise; (3) it usually does not absorb the reader into its world—the reader is more likely to feel “sorry for all men rather than vividly sympathetic with” the character in question; (4) it is always fantasy with reliance on the “preternatural”; (5) myth is always sobering, never comic in the sense of amusing; (6) and true myth is always captivating and “aweinspiring,” with a “numinous” quality.13 The power of myth is such that the quality of the vehicle, whether in verse or prose, rarely matters. The subject is the overarching concern of the reader. And it is this power that Lewis unleashes on the reader in the novel Till We Have Faces. THE MYTH: THEN AND NOW The changes in the myth of Cupid and Psyche that Lewis made make Till We Have Faces even more attractive. In the original version by Apuleius, a royal couple find themselves in conflict with the gods because the people have chosen to worship their beautiful daughter Psyche rather than Aphrodite.

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The Greek and Roman gods were notoriously fickle and vindictive, so Apollo commands that Psyche be sacrificed to a dragon. Her father obeys. However, the scorned Aphrodite has already decided on a worse punishment for Psyche: making her fall madly in love with the worst man possible. Her son Cupid is given the assignment. But, Cupid falls in love with Psyche himself and has her carried off to his secret valley where he lives with her as husband but prohibits her seeing his face. Lonely for her family, Psyche asks that her sisters be allowed to visit her. Against his better judgment, Cupid agrees. Overcome by jealousy, the two sisters plot to ruin Psyche by enticing her to disobey her husband and see his face. Psyche agrees to their plan, wakes Cupid accidentally, and is punished for her disobedience by being exiled. Psyche is prevented from committing suicide and then falls into the clutches of Aphrodite, who gives her impossible jobs to do, a common event in Greek myth. However, through the help of animals and even other gods, Psyche fulfills all the tasks save one. Here the myth overlaps that of Pandora, for Psyche cannot resist the urge to look into the box containing Persephone’s beauty. Cupid intercedes on Psyche’s behalf with Zeus, who agrees to their marriage and makes Psyche into the goddess men had already taken her for. They do indeed live happily ever after and bear a child called Pleasure. So goes the original myth. Lewis however, objected to one key element in the story—the fact that Psyche’s sisters could see her palace. Considering Apuleius to be a relater of the tale, not the author, Lewis could see no reason that he could not change the story to suit his purposes. So, Lewis created a myth in which only one of the sisters confronts Psyche about her situation. And that confrontation takes place based on belief, not sight. Orual must choose to believe both Psyche and her physical appearance or to consider her mad or deceived. Thus, Lewis complicates the original myth by adding the theme of belief to the already-present themes of jealousy and obedience. In addition, Lewis adds another twist to the tale: the storyteller is the protagonist or main character and relates the tale in first person. It would seem then, that the narrator could be trusted by the reader. After all, who better to know the narrator than the narrator herself? However, Orual faces the same challenge of King Oedipus to know thyself, and her narrative begins with one knowledge of herself and ends with quite another. THE MYTH RETOLD Lewis changed the bones of the original myth in significant ways. Thus, his subtitle “A Myth Retold,” is a significant signal about what the reader can expect. The novel is not a mere repetition of the myth, but a retelling, an amended version which Lewis thought brought it much closer to meeting the

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characteristics of true myth. In this revision, Lewis adds characters, changes motives, and fleshes out the setting in order to deepen the truth of the story and to make the novel more realistic for his tastes. There are attributes of the mythic in the novel, such as the Westwind’s ability to carry off Psyche without unlocking her chains, but there are common human elements in the story, such as the frictions of an ordinary household, which would not have been a part of Greek myth. By foregrounding the mortals in their interactions with the gods rather than the gods’ interactions with the mortals, Lewis creates a realistic portrayal that resonates more closely with his readers than traditional myth does. After all, how many of us can relate better to a jealous sibling than to the labors of Hercules? The Characters, Or Who Do They Think They Are? The story opens with the tirade of an angry queen, the author of a complaint against the gods. She vows to set down her case against them and to demand an answer from them. Orual is the eldest daughter of King Trom of Glome, a small kingdom in dire need of royal sons. Orual and her sister, Redival, are having their heads shaved because their mother has died. Through the comments of the servants, the reader learns of Orual’s ugliness; this misfortune will cloud all of her actions and color her behavior in ways she cannot imagine. Upon the King’s remarriage, Orual gains the love of her life, a beautiful halfsister named Psyche, so beautiful that the people will consider her a goddess and wreak havoc in the kingdom. Her mother dies in childbirth and Psyche becomes the especial charge of Orual, who invests every ounce of herself into the child, lavishing upon her the Need-love generated in large part by the abuse heaped on her by her selfish father who is not above adding physical harm to emotional harm. The birth of yet another daughter thwarts Trom’s plans for the kingdom and sets the stage for civil unrest and religious tragedy. Alienated by Orual’s obsession with Psyche, Redival falls under the influence of Batta, a self-serving opportunistic nurse who tells tales to the king and creates crises in the palace. Against the backdrop of this dysfunctional family, Lewis sets the Fox, a captured Greek slave brought to the palace as a tutor for the king’s daughters. The Fox introduces the learning and rational thinking of the Greeks into a kingdom wrapped in traditional worship of the fertility goddess, Ungit. Bardia is another positive addition to the novel, serving as a bridge between the world of men and Orual’s world. Sympathetic to the plight of Psyche, Bardia risks his life to allow the sisters a chance of farewell and then offers Orual an outlet for her overwhelming sorrow in teaching her swordsmanship. He also serves as a foil to the Fox upon the discovery of Psyche in her valley, instantly

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according the unusual circumstances to her divinity rather than rationalizing them away as the Fox does. Through the “Grandfather” Fox and the “Ally” Bardia, Orual is given not only opposing beliefs to choose from but also the emotional support she needs. Though Orual is the main character, the narrator, and perhaps the mirror of the reader, she would be nothing without Psyche. For Psyche is Orual’s foil—beautiful, not ugly, and willing to accept the work of the gods in her life, even in her death. Psyche’s self-sacrificing actions, her Gift-love on behalf of the people, during a plague contrast with Orual’s consuming Need-love. The remedy to this imbalance is the ultimate focus of the novel. And it is portraying the transformation of Orual into Psyche, which is a way of showing a myth turning into a reality, which is Lewis’s purpose. CHARACTERS OF MYTHIC PROPORTIONS The Greeks and the Romans held the same general panoply of gods; they merely called them by different names. Other cultures also had similar gods, but with different names. What follows is a brief explanation of the similar names of gods and goddesses Lewis used in his novel, with some relevant details of their mythic identities. Figures from Myth The Roman Cupid/Greek Eros is the son of Venus/Aphrodite and Mercury, the lad of love who falls in love with Psyche and condemns Orual’s unbelief. Psyche is the Greek word for “breath or soul.” Venus/Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty and the mother of Cupid/Eros, who assigns Psyche her tasks while in exile. Zephyr or Westwind is the son of Aeolus and Aurora, a soft and gentle wind and the rescuer of Psyche. Figures from Legend Iphigenia is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. To placate Artemis (Diana, goddess of the hunt), Agamemnon agrees to sacrifice the most beautiful thing to come into his life in a year. Unfortunately this thing is his infant daughter. He puts off the sacrifice as long as possible, but as the fleet leaves for the Trojan War, he prepares to sacrifice her. Artemis sweeps Iphegenia away just in time, substituting a deer in her place. Here is Psyche’s transformation from sacrificed to saved. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Upon Oedipus’ exile, Creon takes the throne of Thebes. When Oedipus’s sons rebel

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against the wicked king, they are killed, and Creon declares they must remain unburied. Antigone defies Creon’s edict and buries her brothers. She is caught by Creon and walled up in a cave to die. Orual’s dilemma arises because of her resentment at being unable to replace her sister as Iphegenia. Instead, she is left with the role of Antigone, rescuing the bones of her sister and giving them a decent burial. And, like Antigone, Orual finds herself in a pillar-room of death, learning that her own death as well as Psyche’s is also demanded. THE CONFLICT IN LEWIS’S RETOLD MYTH A story without conflict would be only a series of events and not very compelling reading. Lewis presents many conflicts in Till We Have Faces, some abstract and some concrete. It is these varied oppositions that make the novel worth rereading, for nuances of meaning emerge upon each repetition. Critics have spent vast amounts of space detailing and discussing these conflicts. Peter Schakel writes a book-length analysis of the conflict between reason and imagination.14 The influence of the Greek emphasis on rational analysis is present most directly in the character of the Fox, named for his wily ability to manage people as well as philosophy. But undoubtedly, the Great Knock loomed large over Lewis’s shoulder as he penned the novel. Himself a student of reason, especially in matters of religion, Lewis pits the Fox against the Priest of the House of Ungit both philosophically as well as actually. When attempting to save Psyche’s life, the Fox argues eloquently against the mysticism of the worship of Ungit, especially the inconsistency of the explanation of who exactly Ungit and her son the Shadowbrute are, and how the Accursed can be so titled and yet be mandated to be a perfect sacrifice. But words are powerless against the priest who parries each of the Fox’s rational thrusts with an exposition on the nature of religious belief. And indeed, the close of the novel sides with the priest: compared to an actual experience with divinity all else is “only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”15 The Fox loses this battle and the priest sways the king’s will to sacrifice his daughter (he is not-so-secretly relieved that he himself is spared). Orual finds herself in a similar conflict of religious devotion. Rather than prevailing upon Psyche to despair at her sentence, Orual is crushed to find that her sister is at peace, anticipating the fulfillment of her lifelong Sehnsucht: “The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain. . . . And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, ‘Psyche come!’”16 Here is Orual’s rationalism, even though based on mysticism, pitted against imagination and a realization that there is more to this life, as Lewis writes in Mere Christianity,

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“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”17 Psyche has that ability to meet death serenely, even eagerly, because she is convinced of another dimension to herself and this world. To find any peace in her own life, Orual must come to the same conclusion. Then there is the conflict of Need-love versus Gift-Love. Orual’s grasping, devouring, need for the unreserved affection of those around her drives all of her actions. Suffering a lack of natural affection in her life, Orual latches, one could almost say “leeches,” onto Psyche wishing a connection to the child that encompasses all the ones possible. Psyche’s refusal to stay bound by Orual’s need for her, and her attempt to convince Orual of the rightness of the sacrifice, set Orual’s journey of self-discovery into motion. Fueled by rejection by the object of her love, Orual is utterly unable to accept the reality of Psyche’s marriage. Determined that she knows best, Orual plots to restore Psyche to her rightful affection for Orual, if not to her right mind. Contrasted with this destructive Need-love is the Gift-love of Psyche who recognizes her obligations to her husband, but willingly pays the price of disobedience in order to prevent Orual’s threatened suicide. Considering the cost to Orual greater than the cost to herself, Psyche suffers exile from all she loves. Without a recognition of her selfish Need-love, Orual is condemned to wander herself, always farther from those she loves though she has them near at hand. At the heart of Orual’s journey and Lewis’s alteration of the myth is another conflict: that of faith and sight. Educated by the Stoic Fox, whose philosophy relies on experience, Orual lacks the recognition of the divine nature of life. Psyche’s willingness to experience that divine aspect saves her life and ultimately makes real the divinity assigned to her by the Glomish populace. Presented with the fact of Psyche’s continued existence and even good health, Orual must choose whether to believe her sister’s reality or be deceived by her own senses. Food and water outweigh radiant body and soul, and Orual rejects the evidence in front of her. Psyche’s ragged clothes cannot cover her joyful being, but they can and do cover Orual’s ability to see the alternate reality of Psyche’s experience. Betraying that vision as well as their relationship, Orual threatens to destroy herself rather than see Psyche continue to thrive. But that alternate reality cannot be completely denied, and Orual is given a glimpse of the god’s palace. Now she must reject her own senses as well as that of her sister. Without the dynamic of faith in her life, Orual blames the gods, the authors of that other reality that she herself is too willingly blind to see. Clinging to her reason, Orual spends years further cementing the scales of unbelief on her eyes. Her assumption of the veil is only the physical manifestation of her unwillingness to face the truth. Ironically, manipulating the senses of her subjects gives her the power she is unwilling to grant to the gods.

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THE RESOLUTION IN LEWIS’S RETOLD MYTH Resolving conflict often is a lengthy process that depends on the willingness of the parties to recognize their faults and readjust their positions. Orual’s conflict with those she loves and the gods is no exception. Working through the issues is not only the substance of the novel: it is Orual’s lifelong journey from self-knowledge, to renunciation, to transformation. These stages are emphasized below by key statements in the novel. Self-Knowledge: “You, Woman, Shall Know Yourself and Your Work. You Also Shall Be Psyche”18 Here is the god’s response to Orual after instigating Psyche’s disobedience, and the words act as a sentence of judgment upon her. Borne out over the many years of Part One of the novel and culminating in Part Two, Orual learns first to know herself. Drawing upon the Greek mantra to “know yourself,” Lewis’s novel is set up as the self-discovery of the main character. Though Orual herself sets the book up as a complaint before the gods, she nevertheless structures it as an autobiography; introducing it is “I am old now,” but beginning the account in the past with “the day my mother died and they cut off my hair, as the custom is.”19 Thus, as she writes, she records the historical details of her life and of her family and of the kingdom of Glome, but in the recording of these details, she is constantly looking for evidence against the gods. However, as Peter Schakel notes, in the final reading of her complaint before the judge, Orual judges herself, and finds that the complaint is itself the answer to itself.20 So in this effort to muster evidence against the gods, Orual discovers instead evidence against herself and warns the reader that doing so, “the very writing itself,” began her process of learning “much more than I did about the woman who wrote it [Part One].”21 Along the way Orual identifies herself in two significant ways: as Queen and as Ungit. As Queen, Orual gains power over her dying father and finds compensation for her ugliness both behind the veil and through the ruling of her people. She profits from the upbringing and continued advice of the Fox and improves Glome’s economy, political standing, and infrastructure. But as Queen, Orual also finds additional means to subvert the process of learning to know herself. Throwing herself into her work in order to avoid the thought of Psyche and her own encounter with the god, Orual does wrong to others through her own lack of understanding the proper characteristics of agape love. Queenship power gives her not only the opportunity but also the right to order the lives of those around her, and the consuming love evidenced first with Psyche multiplies itself.

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But Orual also learns to know her work. She certainly learns to know the futility of Queenship. Though she initially believes that being ruler will bring her fulfillment, she soon discovers that in spite of her military prowess, she is not “one of the boys”; indeed their behavior often disgusts her. She finds herself set apart by sex as well as by position. As Queen, she judges between the people of Glome, negotiates with neighboring lands, and tries to squelch the memory of days gone by. She sends Redival away in a political matchmaking effort, which though successful, still leaves Orual alone of her family still in Glome. She expends considerable effort to remove the memory of Psyche, alienating herself further from the past. She keeps the Fox near her, but the secret of Psyche and her palace remains a breach in their relationship. Bardia is a futile effort to create a pseudo-family, for though she can command his allegiance, she cannot command his affection, and at the end of the day, as long a day as possible, Bardia returns to his home, leaving Orual isolated in the palace. Power is not the answer to a misunderstood love; it merely compounds the effects. As Ungit, a recognition made late in Orual’s life and in the story, Orual devours those devoted to her. Orual consumes those around her, much like she consumed Psyche. The freed Fox is subtly pressured to remain in Glome, his life constrained by service to the Queen. She appropriates the Fox’s wisdom for her own, refusing to recognize that she has the power to end his captivity in reality, not just in words. Though she grants him his freedom, she binds him to her in ways more unbreakable than shackles had ever been. Though he continues the filial love toward Orual, which was developed from the beginning, she does not see that her demands upon him exhaust him physically and her deception over Psyche denies him a true relationship with her emotionally. Her father may have threatened to send the Fox to the mines, but Orual is the one who truly enslaves him. Bardia is another case illustrating the devouring nature of Ungit. Hidden behind her veil, Orual sees Bardia in another light. She consumes him physically, keeping him at the palace and on military endeavors for extended periods of time unnecessarily. Jealous of his wife, she binds Bardia to her through manly activities and patriotic fervor. In doing so she denies him the sanctuary of his home, replacing it with a false one of her royal presence. Though Ungit demands sacrifices of the Glomish people, she does so in order to preserve society and maintain order, as evidenced by the need to sacrifice Psyche in order to return the land to economic plenty. Orual, on the other hand, deprives Bardia and Ansit of the home life that Ungit blessed. In doing so, Orual manifests a greater measure of devouring than evidenced in even her relationship with Psyche. Of course, the recognition of Ungit behavior, which is crucial to Orual’s reformation, is her obsessive love for Psyche. The last comfort taken from Orual even after she despises herself as Ungit is that

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she did not love Psyche truly. The first chronological evidence of her lack of understanding of love is the last evidence in the lifelong case against her. As Ungit, Orual reveals herself to be more than ugly and faceless; she cannot hide the consuming nature that her improper understanding of love generates. The reader is presented with one woman’s journey toward self-knowledge and is invited to think of the process as being active in the reader’s life as well. And that case is also Orual’s work. Her complaint is her work, the work of her hands as well as her life. It is a record of her labors, corresponding to that of Psyche in exile, the separating of word and action, the keeping of truth and dismissal of lies. But Orual does not achieve any more success with her bookwork than she does with her work as Queen. Yes, she sets down a record accurately, as far as she can tell. But without self-knowledge, it is an impossible task, as impossible a task as that of Psyche’s sifting of seeds without help from the ants. This failure is acknowledged by Orual, finally, after she reads her complaint before the judge. The facts she set down do not turn out to be the truth. Self-deception is a fruit of selfish love, and when Orual confronts the deception, she is ready to face the false love. Ironically, it is in the world of “seeings” that Orual recognizes reality, the reality that her efforts as Queen and as writer have functioned to fulfill what Carnell calls her “vocation.”22 Orual’s fanatical determination to recover Psyche’s body from the tree of sacrifice works itself out as destruction, not salvation, both of Psyche and Orual herself. But that same destruction is the vehicle for Orual to aid Psyche in fulfilling her tasks, which in turn lead to the transformation of Orual into Psyche, just as the god ordained. This circular pattern, seen in the spiritual terms which “vocation” rather than “work” indicates, is the central truth of Lewis’s work. Renunciation: “Die Before You Die. There’s No Chance After”23 Orual is told in her despairing attempt to rectify her faults by her own hand. Having just come from the House of Ungit and witnessed for yet another time the birth of the new year, Orual confronts the other end of life: death. In yet another “seeing” she is accosted by her father, told to leave off her veil, and taken to the Pillar Room. Here Orual is told to dig up the floor. When the hole is large enough, her father tells her to fling herself down; unwilling, she is forced to jump when he takes her hand. In yet another Pillar Room, of dirt this time, she is forced to dig again and to jump again. Each level of falling leads her into a deeper and deeper tomblike hole. The third and final Pillar Room is made of rock and actually closes in upon them. Here her father asks her, “Who is Ungit?” and leads her to the very mirror she dreaded in life.24 Her reply, “I am Ungit,” is the ending of the vision and the beginning

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of the re-vision.25 Recognizing the devouring nature of her being, Orual seeks to destroy the ugliness she was previously content to veil by killing herself. Indeed, she wears no veil whatsoever as she makes her way to the Shennit. This barefaced action corresponds to the first true vision she has of herself. However, at the river she is prevented from suicide by the voice of the god. In answer to the command, she asks, “Lord, who are you?”26 That, of course, is not the issue. And she gets no answer; instead she is told that Ungit is in the Deadlands as well and there is no escape in destroying her body. Her reply, “Lord, I am Ungit,”27 is, however, a step in the right direction, for it shows that she is willing to admit to a higher power her true nature. But admission is as powerless as mere self-knowledge in bringing about change. To change she must “die before [she] die[s].”28 As a result of this second encounter with the god, Orual seeks to reform her nature; she determines to be the best ruler and person possible. But self-reformation is as impossible as committing suicide had been. Both are equally inaccessible to her. As with the admission of her true nature, Orual is accurate in her assessment of the necessary course of action; she does need a changed self. But her efforts to change must come about through the renunciation of her deceptive comfort that at least she had loved Psyche well. Until she properly understands the scope of her faulty and damaging love, in effect recognizing it for the death, not life, it brought to those in its path, Orual is left with an empty life and nothing to gain by death. Transformation: “You Also Are Psyche”29 Orual’s efforts to rid herself of the memory of the broken relationship with Psyche range from the physical walling up of the castle well to the enshrinement of Psyche’s belongings. More importantly, she seeks refuge from memory in her work as Queen. But here, unknown to her, is the first stage of her transformation, for she fulfills aspects of the tasks assigned to Psyche and provides for Psyche’s success, which in turn bring about the ultimate success of Orual herself. Only upon recognition of her role in Psyche’s punishment is Orual finally able to understand her Ungit-like treatment of this beloved sister. And only through that understanding is the transformation possible. And it is this transformation—Orual into Psyche—that comes true, foretold by the god in the moment of Orual’s greatest failing. It is the changing of blindness into sight, for Orual, when transformed into Psyche, has perfect vision of the god’s palace and a true recognition of Psyche’s position and worth. When Orual is prepared to admit Psyche’s god nature and the lack of it in herself, she is able to accept Psyche’s gift of beauty, which results in her transformation.

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But Orual is also transformed from faceless Ungit, ugly and veiled from men’s sight, consuming those nearest to her, into one with a face, finally capable of facing the truth about herself and the reality of the gods and their dealings with her. In the lowest Pillar Room, Orual’s mirror reveals more than her ugliness. It confronts her with reality without which she can never hope to change. She moves from self-deception to self-knowledge. She becomes Psyche, not just does the tasks of Psyche, the work of Psyche, but becomes the essence of Psyche who is already joined unto the god, loved by him, and known by him. And when that transformation takes place, Orual’s work is finished. She has little time left to add to her book, that work which culminates with a true recognition of the reality of God, the one who is “yourself the answer.”30 Ultimately, her own transformation coincides with the transformation of her view of the gods and their works in her life. She moves from the accusation in Part One that the gods give no answer in to a recognition in Part Two that they are the answer. Through this experience she becomes the essence of her epitaph: “The most wise, just, valiant, fortunate and merciful of all the princes known in our parts of the world.”31 You also shall be Psyche is now fulfilled. The prophecy comes true; Orual is Psyche in body and soul as well as in her people’s opinions. A remarkable transformation indeed. THE MYTH DEMYSTIFIED Lewis considered Till We Have Faces to be his best work, though few others, now or then, have shared his judgment. But a significant and growing body of criticism now exists offering a range of comments on this last novel of Lewis’s. A brief survey of these critiques reveals that Lewis drew upon all his knowledge and well-honed skills to fashion his book. Philosophically, the idea of Orual’s ugliness is more than a mere plot detail. Carla Arnell argues that it is more than a mere representation of the state of her soul. Instead, the physical differences between Orual and Psyche and even between Orual and Redival point up the more important idea of justice; people do not experience life in the same circumstances.32 Orual’s sense of justice, perhaps accounted for by the terrible treatment at her father’s hands, a topic thoroughly discussed by Georgiana L. Williams, nevertheless manifests itself in her treatment of others, Bardia in particular.33 Priding herself on her work as judge of her people, she violates the very sense of right behavior toward her devoted subject, depriving him of his rest and family. In her transformation from Orual to Psyche, Orual takes upon herself the queenship of Glome, a minor triumph over her father, which is undermined by his appearance in one of her “seeings.” Michael Anastasi develops the idea that Lewis is presenting a model for the Christian who is also undergoing a transformation into a “whole” person by becoming like

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Christ.34 For Orual to become the ruler of a prosperous kingdom at rest, she must arrive at that state within herself. And as Ralph Wood notes, Orual is unable to be at peace herself until her “love life” is properly ordered.35 Orual declares herself that her love for Psyche is not undone, but that she now loves Psyche properly, unlike the devouring love of their earlier lives. And it is at that point that Orual finds herself transformed into Psyche and thus into the same relationship with the god. Augustine’s idea that lesser goods must be loved less than greater goods holds true in Orual’s life, a fact that Thomas Watson more fully develops in his discussion of the Fox’s odd remark that even Psyche was born into the house of Ungit.36 The identification of both sisters with Ungit and then their identification with the god finds its roots in Augustine as well. This idea of a hierarchy of love is present in Gwyneth Hood’s work as she addresses the relationship between loving and hating in the novel, a relationship that clouds the mind and perception of Orual.37 The priest’s words that “nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them [the gods]”38 point up the fact that human nature is naturally deficient in understanding the divine, but those who surrender themselves to improper emotions create an almost insurmountable barrier to true understanding, one that will take divine intervention to tear down. Nancy-Lou Patterson develops the idea of the distance between the human and the divine through a discussion of the physical characteristics of Ungit, her house, and the rituals associated with the goddess.39 And Ungit should be a matter of discussion, for if there were a power behind the throne, it would be the superstitious reality of Ungit, the ugly fertility goddess that demands human sacrifice. Though the physical description of Ungit is a shapeless, faceless stone, the living essence of her is the priest who links the human with the divine. David Landrum explores the three priests who perform this function as well as instruct the reader about the nature of the divine, mysterious, and holy—the old priest who is unafraid of King Trom; the priest Arnom who though influenced by the Greek ways of Orual even to the extent of erecting a beautiful statue of Ungit nevertheless guides the people in the old ways; and the priest of Essur whose story of Psyche is the catalyst for Orual’s writing of the complaint.40 Though Arnom seems to have changed the way of Ungit, he yet serves to unite Orual and the divine as her recognition of herself as Ungit occurs in a “seeing,” which happens on the heels of the rite of the Year’s birth. This crucial recognition of her devouring nature is the first step in her transformation. Kathryn Lindskoog offers some practical understanding of Ungit by exploring the historical nature of fertility goddesses as well as the meaning of the name. She also offers insight into

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the reason for the excavation of the Pillar Room, which leads to Orual’s identification of herself as Ungit.41 Those interested in the narrative underpinnings of the novel will find several excellent discussions of the structure of the novel. Mara E. Donaldson’s article details the significance of the storytelling phenomenon in the novel itself as well as in Lewis’s own retelling of the myth.42 Will and Mimosa Stephenson follow suit and add an inquiry into the significance of Part II as a vehicle for reader introspection concerning the very struggle Orual is undergoing in regard to her affections.43 Doris T. Myers approaches the novel’s details by way of the books which Orual collects during her reign and the accompanying insight that she should have gained based on a reading of them,44 as well as offers a book-length study looking at the novel from various angles.45 Ake Bergvall expounds the nature of myth both outside and inside the novel, seeing the characters themselves as living the lives that would become the myth as Lewis retells it.46 Though nearly all conceivable topics have been addressed, little has been done with the epigraph: “Love is too young to know what conscience is.” This quotation, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 151, appears on the title page underneath the book title and, given Lewis’s obvious intention to draw the reader’s attention to it, it deserves a closer look. With the book The Four Loves following on the heels of Till We Have Faces, it seems reasonable to see in the epigraph a glimmer of the analytical approach to love that the treatise makes and which the novel illustrates. In Lewis’s Studies in Words, he elaborates on the differences between conscience and conscious. In light of that discussion, it seems to me that the epigraph couples nicely with the god’s injunction to Orual: “You, woman, shall know yourself and your work.” The root problem in Orual’s life is the flawed love that she demonstrates toward those in her life; so much has been established. Combining this flawed love with conscience is a necessary step in Orual’s life, since the epigraph states that the love in the novel is not mature and thus is flawed. Lewis’s discussion of conscience details two aspects, both of which apply: one is the idea of being aware of one’s actions, and the other is the more familiar idea of a moral guide. It is because our conscience knows our actions that we feel guilt or approval about those actions. So the epigraph charges Love with being too young to know both what it is doing and whether what it is doing is good or evil. The god’s “sentence” on Orual is to become aware of her actions and then to respond properly to them, a thing she eventually does. Thus, Lewis presents the reader with the fundamental truth of the novel on the title page: Orual possesses a flawed love that offers evidence to condemn her by her own conscience when she matures enough to recognize the truth of herself and her work.

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THE MYTH ENDURES As the fruit of nearly all of Lewis’s lifetime of learning and writing, Till We Have Faces is a challenging but rewarding novel to read and reread. Lewis wrote in the British edition of the book that one of its themes was “the havoc which a vocation, or even a faith, works on human life.”47 The consequences of both Psyche’s devotion to the god of the mountain at the expense of her relationship with Orual, and of Orual’s devotion to herself at the expense of her relationship with everyone else, is a sobering warning to contemporary readers who are prone to having such devotions. Balance and proportion in relationships is a struggle common to every reader, and it is that common ground that makes the novel powerful as an indictment against not only Orual but also the reader. The novel also remains worthwhile reading for its portrayal of a woman with various roles and societal pressures forced upon her. Finding her path through education and self-assertion, Orual could be read as Lewis’s offering of a role model. However, it is significant to note that Lewis creates a character who finds that even the ultimate power of queenship is insufficient to bring her fulfillment and peace. Orual bitterly regrets her lack of personal relationships and finds her advancement cuts her off from those who remain after Psyche’s departure. Lewis seems to indicate the only true solution to finding rest in a restless world is when Orual and Psyche are made one with each other and with the god.

MYTH AND REALITY Orual ends the first part of her tale with the charge that the gods will condemn themselves in the minds of the people by not answering her accusation. It little matters to Orual what punishment they use on her; her goal is to discredit them. She accuses them of setting her a riddle by letting her see the glimpse of the palace and then withdrawing that sight and the accompanying ability to perceive other realities. Like Oedipus, Orual accuses the gods of trapping her in circumstances beyond her control, then judging her unfairly for her reactions. Like Oedipus, she must come to a knowledge of herself before she can unravel the circumstances of her life and loves. But unlike Oedipus, she comes to see that the answer is not in her power as Queen or even as a god-figure, Ungit. Orual’s answer lies in the god, which she mistrusted and caused others to betray. The answer to Orual’s struggle to have a proper love is in the author of love, the figure of Cupid and Psyche’s sacred lover in the novel. It is he who prophesies her transformation and ultimate reconciliation with Psyche

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by being made Psyche herself. And it is he who pronounces the truth: Orual is Psyche but more than being merely physically Psyche, Orual is granted the relationship which Psyche has with the god himself. Orual’s veiled face is in stark contrast to the bare face of the god before whom no answer is necessary, no question is appropriate. She meets that power face to face only when she lays aside her own veil, the veil of self-deception and refuge from the truth. The lasting power of Lewis’s novel lies perhaps not in its skillful telling and complex thematic material, but in its illustration of pure and selfless relationships with family and divinity as offering the answers to the most central questions of life. NOTES 1. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion & Guide (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1996), 77. 2. Ibid., 243–244. 3. C. S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1991), 142. 4. Ibid., 266. 5. Hooper, Companion & Guide, 246–247. 6. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1984), 50. 7. C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 102. 8. Kelli Brew, “Facing the Truth on the Road to Salvation: An Analysis of That Hideous Strength and Till We Have Faces,” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 22(1) (1998), 10–12. 9. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 17. 10. Ibid., 73. 11. Ibid., 118. 12. Ibid., 235. 13. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 43–44. 14. Peter Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces (Grand Rapids, MI Eerdmans, 1984), http://www.hope.edu/academic/English/ schakel/tillwehavefaces.html/. 15. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 308. 16. Ibid., 74. 17. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Westwood, NJ: Barbour, 1952), 115. 18. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 174. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Schakel, Reason and Imagination (1984).

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21. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 253. 22. Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 111. 23. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 279. 24. Ibid., 276. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 279. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 308 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Carla Arnell, “On Beauty, Justice, and the Sublime in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces,” Christianity and Literature 52(1) (2002), 23–33. 33. Georgiana L. Williams, “Till We Have Faces: A Journey of Recovery,” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 18(4) (1994), 5–15. 34. Michael J. Anastasi, “King of Glome: Pater Rex,” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 19(1) (1995), 13–19. 35. Ralph C. Wood, “The Baptized Imagination: C. S. Lewis’s Fictional Apologetics,” Christian Century (August 30) (1995), 812–819. 36. Thomas Ramey Watson, “Enlarging Augustinian Systems: C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces,” Renascence 46(3) (1994), 163–175. 37. Gwyneth Hood, “Husbands and Gods as Shadowbrutes: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ from Apuleius to C. S. Lewis,” Mythlore 15(2) (1988), 33–43. 38. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 50. 39. Nancy-Lou Patterson, “The Holy House of Ungit,” Mythlore 21(4) (1997), 4–15. 40. David Landrum, “Three Bridge-Builders: Priest-Craft in Till We Have Faces,” Mythlore 22(4) (2000), 59–67. 41. Kathryn Lindskoog, “Ungit and Orual: Facts, Mysteries, and Epiphanies,” CSL: The New York C. S. Lewis Society Bulletin (2000), http://www.lindentree.org/ ungit.html. 42. Mara E. Donaldson, “Orual’s Story and the Art of Retelling: A Study of Till We Have Faces,” in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 157–170. 43. Will and Mimosa Stephenson, “Structure and Audience: C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces,” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 21(1) (1997), 4–10. 44. Doris. T. Myers, “Browsing the Glome Library,” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2002), 63–76. 45. Cf. Doris T. Myers, Bareface: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Last Novel (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004).

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46. Ake Bergvall, “A Myth Retold: C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces,” Mythlore (Summer 1984), 5–12, 22. 47. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, 244. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anastasi, Michael, J. “King of Glome: Pater Rex.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 19(1) (1995), 13–19. Arnell, Carla. “On Beauty, Justice, and the Sublime in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.” Christianity and Literature 52(1)(2002), 23–35. Bartlett, Sally A. “Humanistic Psychology in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: A Feminist Critique.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22(2) (1989), 185– 198. Bergvall, Ake. “A Myth Retold: C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces.” Mythlore (Summer 1984), 5–12, 22. Brew, Kelli. “Facing the Truth on the Road to Salvation: An Analysis of That Hideous Strength and Till We Have Faces.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 22(1) (1998), 10–12. Carnell, Corbin Scott. Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974. Donaldson, Mara E. “Orual’s Story and the Art of Retelling: A Study of Till We Have Faces.” In Word and Story in C. S. Lewis. Edited by Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar. Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1991, 157–170. Hood, Gwyneth. “Husbands and Gods as Shadowbrutes: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ from Apuleius to C. S. Lewis.” Mythlore 15(2) (1988), 33–43. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: Companion & Guide. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1996. Landrum, David. “Three Bridge-Builders: Priest-Craft in Till We Have Faces.” Mythlore 22(4) (2000), 59–67. Lesfloris, H., and I. C. Storey, Compilers. “An Annotated Bibliography to C. S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold.” At http://www.ivory.trentu.ca/ www/cl/Lewis-bib.html. Lewis. C. S. All My Road Before Me. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1991. ———. “Christian Apologetics.” In God in the Dock. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 89–103. ———. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. Mere Christianity. Westwood, NJ: Barbour, 1952. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, 1955. ———. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1984. Lindskoog, Kathryn. “Ungit and Orual: Facts, Mysteries, and Epiphanies.” CSL: The New York C. S. Lewis Society Bulletin (2000). At http://www.lindentree. org/ungit.html.

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Myers, Doris T. Bareface: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Last Novel. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004. ———. “Browsing the Glome Library.” An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2002), 63–76. Patterson, Nancy-Lou. “The Holy House of Ungit.” Mythlore 21(4) (1997): 4–15. Schakel, Peter J. Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984. ———. “Seeing and Knowing: The Epistemology of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 4 (1983), 84–97. Smallwood, Julie. Out From Exile: C. S. Lewis and the Journey to Joy. A Comparative Study of Surprised by Joy and Till We Have Faces. M.A. Thesis. Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH. Unpublished. 1999. Stephenson, Will and Mimosa. “Structure and Audience: C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 21(1) (1998), 4–10. Watson, Thomas Ramey. “Enlarging Augustinian Systems: C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces.” Renascence 46(3) (1994), 163–175. Williams, Georgiana L. “Till We Have Faces: A Journey of Recovery.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society 18(4) (1994), 5–15. Wood, Ralph C. “The Baptized Imagination: C. S. Lewis’ Fictional Apologetics.” Christian Century (August 30) (1995), 812–819.

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C. S. Lewis’s Short Fiction and Unpublished Works Katherine Harper

Given C. S. Lewis’s stellar reputation in the fields of the essay, literary criticism, poetry, and the novel, readers may find it surprising how seldom he is recognized for his short fiction. Still more surprising is how little he did of this type of work. In fact, Lewis published only two short stories within his lifetime, and those in a minor magazine outside his own country. Several other short tales and fragmentary novels have been published posthumously, and between two and four more previously unpublished works exist within the author’s personal papers. Brought to light, these will be welcome additions to the canon. This is no guarantee, however, that the “new” works will be as compelling as the author’s pre-1964 writings. The short stories credited to Lewis to date fall below his usual standard. Without the flexibility to develop settings and personalities gradually over the course of chapters, their author sometimes traded characterization for caricature, and subtle persuasion for sermonizing. The logic for which Lewis was justly famous is not always put to use. Certainly these fictions have their moments, and some of those moments are excellent, but a reader cannot be faulted for expecting better overall from an author of this stature. Lewis’s short stories and posthumous works have a few more-or-less common threads. Yet in their reception by readers, at least, they have proven to be anything but common works.

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FORMS OF THINGS KNOWN: TWO STORIES “The Shoddy Lands” and “Ministering Angels,” the only short stories published during Lewis’s lifetime, first appeared in the mid-1950s in a digestsized American pulp, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Both were subsequently anthologized in the magazine’s annual “Best Of ” collections and later in Of Other Worlds (1966) and The Dark Tower and Other Stories (1977). Where some authors concentrate their descriptive powers on the appearances and personalities of their human characters, Lewis’s particular knack was creating multidimensional other worlds. Narnia is such a place; however, because the books that feature it are intended for children, he handles his delineation in almost entirely visual style. In the works for adults, Lewis’s descriptions turn sensuous, incorporating flavors, scents, music, and physical sensations outside the realm of human knowledge. When Ransom first begins to explore the floating islands of Perelandra—a deep-space Eden in formative state—he is dazzled by that planet’s unfamiliar colors, the textures and luscious tastes of its newly invented fruits, and its masses of flowers whose intoxicating perfume has the ability to transport. Such gorgeous description must have had special poignancy in the shabby, bomb-scarred, and oleomargarine-andsaccharine world of wartime Great Britain. Lewis would limn these lunar cityscapes with equal care in the apologetic, The Great Divorce (1945). Had the plot called for it, “The Shoddy Lands” (F&SF, February 1956) might have depicted an equally Lewisian locale. Instead, its narrator finds himself thrust unexpectedly into a world something like a bad impressionist painting, one that frustrates and puzzles him by its lack of detail. The people he encounters there are blurry and featureless. The grass is a fuzzy mass lacking individual blades. However, articles of women’s apparel in the shop windows are clearly defined, and these to an unnatural extent. The only identifiable human in this strange world is a too-ideal young woman—one “exactly like the girl in all the advertisements”1 —but of massive size. The narrator recognizes her as Peggy, the fianc´ee of the former student with whom he was chatting at the time of his transport. Then he realizes where he must be: inside Peggy’s simple mind, where she and the fripperies she longs for are of primary importance and her lack of interest renders everything else indistinct. This story’s setting is only partially a C. S. Lewis creation. He based it on his friend Charles Williams’s depiction of the afterlife in All Hallows’ Eve (1945), in which the victims of a freak airplane crash wander about a spectral London where nothing and no one is distinct. The scene in which Lewis’s narrator is surprised to see hats and jewelry with crystal clarity mirrors one midway through the novel where the heroine catches sight of a kitchen item

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she had longed to buy in life. To her, the item is even more detailed than she remembered it; to the friend with her, who has no such emotional association, it is only a blur. One of Lewis’s former pupils wrote to the author’s brother that his tutor “had a near-fanatical devotion to Charles Williams, but when Williams wrote a bad book Lewis readily described it as ‘bloody awful.’”2 Lewis liked All Hallows’ Eve as much as he could any modern-day work. So was this thoroughly negative-toned story a homage to his friend—or a criticism? The answer appears to be that Lewis was reacting not to a bad book, but to Williams’s heroine, a superficial creature who personified his own opinion of half the population. Science fiction author Ursula Le Guin recognized this and wrote, after reading one of the Lewis fiction anthologies, “The spitefulness shown toward women in these tales is remarkable. ‘The Shoddy Lands’ is as startling in its cruelty as in its originality; it is, on several levels, a truly frightening story.”3 The dull and bovine Peggy is a variant of the “men without chests” Lewis deplored in The Abolition of Man (1943) and her world is equally one-dimensional. But the targets of the earlier work are well-educated people who rely on logic to the exclusion of human emotion, beauty, or poetry— that is, who use their brains and their gut instincts, but not the heart that should lie in between. Peggy, by contrast, lacks logic altogether. Aimless and self-absorbed, she is devoid of curiosity about the details of the world around her and, worse still, unaware of her ignorance. The narrator does not try to hide his contempt for her. “Ministering Angels” (F&SF, January 1958) is no kinder to the female sex. In the near future, outlying planets have become long-term destinations for scientists and the occasional hermit. Daily existence on Mars is as lonely and bleak as the landscape itself. The more introverted of the planet’s temporary residents are happy, but not the two young technicians from the latest mission (one of whom has already begun making tentative advances toward the other) nor their captain, a newlywed facing the prospect of three years away from a possibly unfaithful bride. Their situation begins to look brighter when a spaceship arrives bearing “comfort women” from the Woman’s Higher Aphrodisio-Therapeutic Humane Organization. But the men soon discover that the only volunteers to have responded to WHAT-HO’s recruiting pitch are a mannish, highly opinionated intellectual and a Cockney prostitute thirty years past her prime. Horrified by the prospect before them, one of the technicians and two of the new ship’s crew sneak back to the spacecraft and blast off for Earth. The remaining men resign themselves moodily to months or years of what they consider to be unbearable company. The exception is the colony’s lone contemplative, who thanks God for showing him his true purpose in life: to save the soul of the elderly tart.

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As pointed out in its original and anthology introductions, “Ministering Angels” was written in belated response to Dr. Robert S. Richardson’s article “The Day After We Land on Mars,” published in The Saturday Review in late May of 1955. This nonfiction piece pondered what daily life would be like for Earth’s first space colonists and surmised that occasional imports of attractive women would be necessary to preserve the sanity of what he presumed would be the all-male work crews. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction invited Dr. Richardson to expand on this notion and published a revised version of his article in December, just about the time Lewis was deciding where to submit “The Shoddy Lands.”4 “Ministering Angels,” like its predecessor, is decidedly misogynistic. As were so many male scholars of his time (and before, and since), Lewis was unconvinced of women’s ability to reason. When he came across a woman who proved herself his intellectual equal he either—as in the case of Dorothy L. Sayers—accepted her as one of the boys, or, as with philosopher Elisabeth Anscombe, addressed her quietly and politely and steered their conversations away from subjects she was likely to dominate. Nor did Lewis treat intelligent women fairly in much of his fiction. His most vividly drawn woman characters, such as Orual from Till We Have Faces and Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength, are emotion-driven and possessed of a certain na¨ıvet´e. Characters with brains are more likely to be portrayed unsympathetically. The Thin Woman of “Ministering Angels” speaks in a continuous flow of pseudointellectual jargon and refuses to assume a subservient role in conversation. For all her brainpower, she lacks observation skills, never noticing that the young man she is trying hardest to seduce has no interest at all in women. For this reason, some of Lewis’s fans have concluded that he wrote “Ministering Angels” with tongue in cheek. Ursula Le Guin disagreed, stating that as far as his treatment of the polytechnic lecturer was concerned, “However petty, this is hate.”5 Although the Monk’s plan for the Fat Woman is admirable, she pointed out, it never occurs to him that her learned companion might also possess a soul. Lewis’s preferred method of delineating characters was to let information trickle out a bit at a time over the course of chapters. A short-story writer does not have this luxury. Most of the men in “Ministering Angels” are named or are at least given a paragraph or two of descriptive background. Lewis does not provide this touch to either of the newcomers: one of the pair is thin, the other very fat; one educated, the other ignorant; and one severely tailored, the other blowzy. Neither is a human being. Nor are they the only characters glossed over. Mars, whose varied environments Lewis described with such relish in Out of the Silent Planet, here resembles nothing so much as the Australian outback: flat, drab, arid, and home to vegetation that can be consumed by

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wildlife but is deadly to humans. After a dozen pages in this literary desert a reader longs for some of the sensual excesses of the book-length science fiction. TWO “SUBSTANTIAL” FRAGMENTS Literary and religious scholars have found C. S. Lewis a subject for study since the publication of The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1933. Those whose interest extends beyond the finished works to the man and his creative process have access to a treasure trove of primary source material at two repositories: the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Lewis’s own choice to house his papers, and the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois, home to additional items donated by the author’s brother Warnie. In recent years two Lewis scholars have revealed that hidden treasure exists in these archives: a pair of fragmentary works that the estate has yet to release in book form. Like so many young men just out of school, seventeen-year-old Jack Lewis was intensely romantic, with the difference that his notions of adventure and love came not from Sunday matinees and popular novels, but Wagnerian operas and the great heroic works of literature. Having read and absorbed so many of these, Lewis was certain that he had it in him to create an epic of his own. The result is preserved in sixty-four manuscript pages at the Bodleian. “The Quest of Bleharis” was apparently written when young Lewis was just beginning his private studies under logician William T. Kirkpatrick. By way of introduction he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves in May 1916 to describe his delight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, adding, “This letter brings you the first instalment of my romance . . .”6 For the next five months Lewis provided Greeves with regular chapters of an allegorical epic he sometimes exulted over and at other times dismissed as “dull” or “stodgy.” Because the story has yet to be reproduced in full, scholars wishing to learn more must rely on a published account by David C. Downing, whose essays on the science-fiction trilogy can be found elsewhere in the present volumes. Lewis’s first fictional hero is a young man in love with the notion of love, but not its practice. Bleharis is puzzled by his lack of joy at the prospect of marrying his beautiful but distant sweetheart, Alice, and decides to conduct a quest to prove himself worthy of her love. Fascinated by the news that the STRIVER, a miracle-working man—or creature, or spirit—has settled in the rough country far to the north, he decides to set out in search of him. On the first night, as is traditional in such tales, he encounters and must choose between three potential companions: Wan Jadis, a sad and beautiful youth who is on his own quest to find Yesterday; the tense and red-faced Gerce the Desirous, who is in search of Tomorrow; or Hyperites, a voice of calm reason

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and proponent of the STRIVER. He selects the first of these and sets out with him across a murky swamp. Their small boat founders within sight of their destination and, like the Romantic poet he so resembles, Wan Jadis drowns. Bleharis is saved from the same fate by a rose bush that comes to life in the form of a bound and naked young woman and draws him back to shore. Downing writes that at this point Lewis seemed uncertain of what to do next. After introducing a character he may have intended to be the story’s villain, he dispatched the three remaining men and a comic foil to a far-off city in pursuit of a runaway Alice. He planned eventually to reveal the rose-woman as Bleharis’s true love, having written to Greeves with satisfaction that “when the heroine turns up she is in fairly sharp contrast to Alice the Saint.”7 But by October, bogged down in both the convoluted plot and his increasingly more difficult studies, the teenaged romantic gave up his own first quest and never returned to it. While it is not possible to judge an entire heroic epic using only brief snippets of text, the quotes in Downing’s article hint at the scope of Lewis’s reading in and out of school. His affection for Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is evident in his use of that classic work’s narrative style; other settings and characters demonstrate his familiarity with Bunyan, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Chaucer, Cervantes, and the Pearl Poet, among others—and, of course, world myths and Wagnerian opera. “The Quest of Bleharis” appears to demonstrate an insight, depth, and talent well beyond that of a typical seventeen-year-old and should be a valuable source for scholars when published in full. A second work that “might have been” was incorporated into a multivolume family history begun by Warnie Lewis in the 1930s and donated by him to Wheaton College four decades later. As of 2001, when she paraphrased it for her study Sleuthing C. S. Lewis, literary scholar Kathryn Lindskoog was one of the few people outside the family circle to have read it. This 1927 novel in embryo—which she called “The Most Substantial People” after a repeated statement within the text—provides an intriguing glimpse into a single plot idea treated by its author in two very different ways. The first fragmentary chapter introduces Dr. Easley, an Englishman of Irish parentage. He has worked his way up to a fine medical practice despite having been orphaned young and left to fend for himself by prosperous relations in Belfast. One of these, his cousin Scrabo, writes to him at intervals during their youth and reveals himself to the reader, if not the good-hearted doctor, as thoroughly selfish and insincere. One evening, en route to visit his cousin and aunt for the first time, Dr. Easley is forced into company with a scheming braggart of a businessman who looks and acts exactly as he pictures Scrabo, and who turns out to be one of his friends. For various reasons Lindskoog was unable to quote directly from the “Substantial” manuscript, but she revealed

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that this chapter is quite humorous and compared its tone to that of an American novel of five years before, Babbitt. To judge by her paraphrase, it resembles Sinclair Lewis’s overt caricature less than it does a work by Barbara Pym or J. P. Marquand: that is, a skewering of social mores so subtle that a reader not expecting to find satire might overlook it. All pretense of humor apparently disappears in the novel’s second chapter, set some hours after the first. It is based in part on a terrible period in 1923 when Janie Moore’s younger brother, a war veteran and physician whom Lewis admired, began suffering from bouts of dementia and eventually died. Arriving at his relatives’ home, Dr. Easley finds that his elderly aunt is beginning to go mad, obsessing over thoughts of hell to the extent that she barely sleeps or eats. Her delusions are fostered by the family clergyman, the Reverend Bonner, who is convinced that meditation on the afterlife is the only way to save one’s soul. An argument ensues between physician and clergyman over what is best for the old woman. This segues into a long debate on the role played by ethics within pure science or pure religion. At this point Lewis set his narrative aside and never returned to it, at least not directly. Lindskoog notes a resemblance between Hughie McClinnichan, the sly businessman Dr. Easley meets on his way to Belfast, and the Great Divorce spirit whose determination to pocket a golden apple overcomes the seeming impossibility of his picking one up. As described, Dr. Easley’s conversations with the Reverend Bonner—a man who believes that mental cruelty is justified, even proper, if it brings about spiritual salvation—clearly foreshadow Ransom’s philosophical debates with the Un-Man in Perelandra. Given the wide spectrum of Lewis’s reading, however, they may also echo Humphrey Van Weyden’s talks with the logical madman Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904). These two fragments are apparently not the only unknown Lewis writings still to come. Warnie Lewis wrote in his introduction to a collection of his brother’s letters that “in 1912, [Jack] had produced a complete novel, a creditable performance for a boy not yet thirteen; and the interesting thing to note is that this novel, like the sequel to it that followed soon after, revolved entirely around politics.”8 He was not speaking of the brothers’ Boxen tales, which have since been collected. Rather, these book-length works were the result of the boy Lewis’s conviction “that grown-up conversation and politics were one and the same thing; and that everything he wrote must therefore be given a political framework.”9 On the one hand, these sound very dry; on the other, an early twentieth-century Belfast boy’s observations could shed new light on the turbulent politics of the day. The Lewis brothers squirreled away every scrap of their personal writings, so it seems safe to hope that these two juvenile novels will someday be located and published, perhaps

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accompanied by the fragmentary texts of “The Quest of Bleharis” and “The Most Substantial People.” ´ LEWIS . . . APRES Clive Staples Lewis died in November of 1963. A year and a half later, his literary executor, Walter Hooper, contributed an official bibliography of the author’s works to the festschrift Light on C. S. Lewis. At that time, the only short stories listed were the two pulp science fiction tales described above. But less than a year after Light, the first U.K. edition of a Hooper-edited collection called Of Other Worlds introduced a new Lewis story, “Forms of Things Unknown,” and fragments from a work of historical fiction, “After Ten Years.” In 1977, amid much critical buzz, another collection, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, brought to light a third undocumented tale, “The Man Born Blind,” as well as the collection’s lead novella, The Dark Tower, which scandalized Lewis’s fans with its scenes of sadism and sexuality. It was at this point that controversy began to creep into the previously serene field of Lewis studies. Shortly after The Dark Tower’s publication, a teacher and literary scholar from Orange, California, the aforementioned Kathryn Lindskoog, noticed discrepancies between the historical record and claims laid out for the new works’ existence. In particular she was skeptical of Hooper’s statement that he had rescued a large cache of Lewis manuscripts only hours before they were to have been destroyed in a bonfire. She outlined her concerns in a methodical article for the journal Christianity and Literature. To her shock, there was an immediate backlash from readers and the Lewis estate, one of such vehemence that, rather than dissuading her, it made her more curious than ever. Lindskoog began to investigate not only the short fictional works she had originally questioned, but also the contents of every book of new Lewis material and, later, every posthumous reissue of the author’s earlier works. For the next decade she contacted the dwindling number of people who had been close to Lewis in life and posed a series of pointed questions to each. Their written replies fueled her conviction that some of what had been published under C. S. Lewis’s name since his death was, at best, misattributed work by fans, and at worst, the work of one or more literary forgers. Although the product of a low-profile publishing house, Lindskoog’s book The C. S. Lewis Hoax (1988) caused a sensation among scholars. A war of words began to rage in Lewis-themed publications and conferences, one that has lost none of its vitriol since spilling over onto the Internet. “If I attempted a detailed analysis of the Lewis feuds,” biographer A. N. Wilson marveled in 1990, “I should probably fall into as many errors as if I were to attempt

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a discourse on the difference between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.”10 Readers taking part in this debate tend to fall into one of three categories. The first insist that Lewis is infallible and that the “bonfire manuscripts” are proof positive of his authorial genius. The second admit that the works are flawed but assert they are genuine Lewis productions. The third, like Lindskoog, are of the mind that at least some of the new writings are to the canon what cuckoos’ eggs are to an aviary. Of the controversial works, the earliest is said to be “The Man Born Blind” (undated but ca. 1926). Robin, the title character, has had his sight restored through surgery but after three weeks is still confused about the one thing he has always dreamed of seeing: light. His wife and friends have explained endlessly that light is all around him, but Robin cannot perceive it: he expects it to be an object, a tangible something. One morning the newly sighted man takes a solitary walk to an abandoned quarry. There he startles a landscape painter who claims to be in the process of capturing a light so real a person could bathe in it. Robin gladly rushes in the direction the man’s finger is pointing—and plunges to his death in the water below. A dozen years prior to the publication of “The Man Born Blind,” Lewis’s friend, Owen Barfield, wrote that the author had told him a story something like it in the late 1920s. (He added, “He told me afterwards he had been informed by an expert that the acquisition of sight by a blind adult was not in fact the shattering experience he had imagined for the purposes of his story.”11 ) Nor did Barfield deny in later years that “The Man Born Blind” was the tale that had been related to him. This anecdotal evidence was not proof enough for Lindskoog, who declared the work nongenuine. As with all the other questioned items, her primary objection was that it was one of the manuscripts said to have been saved from burning. She scoffed at the notion that Lewis would have created the landscapist, a tremendously angry man who shouts all his dialogue, without giving an explanation for this odd behavior. Likewise she thought the author possessed enough scientific knowledge not to state that fog could part and then close back in on itself as a body passed through it. Access restrictions prevented her ever handling the original manuscript, but one of England’s foremost librarians—a man who disagreed with her assertions—looked at it on her behalf and reported that the mid-1920s story was written in a shade of ink not manufactured until the 1950s. A second handwritten copy turned up in the United States in 1997 but at the time of Lindskoog’s death had not yet been made available for public use. Few other critics have felt the need to comment on this story. Lewis’s friend, Alastair Fowler, one of those who did, shrugged it off as “not very successful” and “reminiscent of the most minor [Walter] de la Mare.”12

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The more competent “Forms of Things Unknown” (undated, ca. 1958) traces the fourth attempt by scientists to send a man to the moon. Previous landings were successful but, in each case, the astronauts stopped communicating with the base after only a few minutes, once in mid-sentence. Blue over a failed romance and curious about his predecessors’ fates, Lieutenant John Jenkin refuses a friend’s offer of company and takes off alone into space. He exits his craft at the usual landing site and begins to explore. Within minutes, he senses that he is being followed—but by whom? Or what? His discomfort only grows when he comes across a group of detailed stone astronaut statues, each posed with head and upper body turned as if to look behind it. Jenkin pulls out a portable transmitter and begins radioing his find back to Earth. Then a shadow falls across him and he turns—to meet the eyes of the snake-haired goddess who makes the moon her home. Once again, questions arose once this story reached print. A scholar named Richard Hodgens pointed out in a 1978 lecture to the New York C. S. Lewis Society that artist Virgil Finlay had used the concept of Medusa on the moon in a cover illustration for the U.S. science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe in late 1958, the year in which Lewis’s story seemed to have been written. Hodgens was of the opinion that the author had seen the painting and written a story to fit it. A second scholar then pointed out that Finlay’s painting had a predecessor of its own: “Island of Fear,” a short story by William Sambrot published nine months previously in another U.S. periodical, The Saturday Evening Post. With the exception of the locale—an island near Greece—this tale’s basic plot and that of “Forms of Things Unknown” are the same. It is worth noting that in December 1959, only a year after Sambrot’s story appeared, Lewis wrote to Alastair Fowler about an undergraduate who dropped out of Magdalen College after Lewis pointed out a “puerile trick” of plagiarism in one of his essays. The tutor stated scornfully that he had never discussed academic honesty with the young man because “I’d as soon think it my business to see that he washed behind his ears or wiped his bottom.”13 Whatever one’s belief about the provenance of “Forms of Things Unknown,” this letter does not state the opinions of a man who would deliberately copy the work of another writer. A third fragmentary work written in around the same period as Lewis’s pulp stories was first published in the collection Of Other Worlds. In five partially connected scenes, “After Ten Years” tells the familiar story of the Trojan War from an original point of view: that of cuckolded King Menelaus of Sparta. “Yellowhair” has spent a decade seething with rage over his wife Helen’s abandonment—in truth an abduction—and dreaming of the torments he will inflict on her when he catches her. But when his troops exit the wooden horse inside the garrison walls and begin sacking Troy, he finds that the once

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indescribably beautiful Helen is now aging and sorrowful. He has her taken prisoner but not maltreated. The next morning Yellowhair’s older brother, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, swaggers onto the scene and informs him with a laugh that the troops have already accepted Helen as their rightful queen. Menelaus begins to wonder if it is possible for a woman’s appearance to change so very much in only ten years. His suspicions are fueled by an Egyptian who tells him he knows the location of the “real” Helen. At this suspenseful point the manuscript ends. Critical reactions to “After Ten Years” focused mainly, once again, on its treatment of women. Ursula Le Guin discovered the story for the first time in its 1977 reprinting and rhapsodized in The New Republic that the opening sequence was “a torment of crowding, cramped muscles, sweat, fear, lust, daydream. . . . a superb beginning.” She added that had its author finished it, this would have been a truly admirable work—then qualified her statement, “If Lewis had treated Helen as a human being. But would he have done so? The indications are that he was going to split her into two stereotypes, heartless beauty and soulless eidolon, the Witch and the Drudge, and would never have arrived at the woman, Helen.”14 Alastair Fowler, by contrast, thought the character was portrayed as altogether a queen and that Lewis had never dealt with the topic of the false image in such tender fashion.15 “After Ten Years” is undated, but the author’s friend Roger Lancelyn Green wrote in one of the printed version’s two “Afterwords” that Lewis had read portions to him in 1959 and 1960 as he composed them and revised one section to include facts Green had told him about the royal couple. Despite its being a “bonfire manuscript,” Kathryn Lindskoog admitted that this was probably a genuine Lewis creation. Certainly it is the work of someone whose knowledge of classics extends beyond the titles taught in most U.S. schools. The second section reworks a scene from Euripides’ The Trojan Women, with the major difference that, in the play, Helen escapes death through seduction, where in the story what saves her is a sad inquiry to Menelaus about the fate of their daughter. An amusing touch—typical of Lewis—is aimed at the select few of his readers who remember their classics. While for the hundredth time rubbing his brother’s nose in his loss of Helen, Agamemnon boasts about the control he exerts over his wife and how proud she will be over his latest triumph. Readers of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia know, however, that Clytemnestra and her lover murdered her husband as soon as he returned from Troy. The greatest critical commotion to date has been in response to The Dark Tower, a fragmentary novel dated 1938. (The date and provenance of this unfinished work is still in dispute.) Said by Lewis’s executor to be a bridge between Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943), the sixty-two-page

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manuscript follows a group of scholars—including Lewis himself—as they ponder for weeks over camera obscura scenes of a civilization that lies either in a parallel universe or their own in a future time. One of them surmises that it might be in hell. The setting is always in or near a tower room the scholars recognize as part of the university library in Cambridge. In this room sits a dark and sinister Something shaped like a man but with an oozing, thornlike sting growing from the center of its forehead. The residents of this “Othertime” are in thrall to the creature and present themselves in turn for sacrifice. Its venom apparently does away with their minds and spirits and they become hard-working automata. The scientists soon notice that one of the Stingingman’s victims bears a strong resemblance to Scudamour, assistant to the projection machine’s inventor. Reacting as if the action on screen is happening to their friend, they watch as this Doppelg¨anger endures a night of agony, emerges as a second Stingingman, and takes the place of the first in the tower room. When the real Scudamour sees the double of the woman he plans to marry approaching for sacrifice, he leaps for the machine, damages it, and somehow changes places with the creature, which flees from the other scientists through the streets of Cambridge. In his new Stingingman persona, Scudamour confronts his “fianc´ee” and learns that Othertime is under threat of invasion by creatures who look as he does but have no barb. In hopes that it will save their nation, ordinary people allow themselves to be stung, an act that drains them of emotion but extends their lifespans and capacity for work. Scudamour begins to delve into the society’s knowledge of science. But at this point, the manuscript ends in mid-sentence. The Dark Tower is unlike any other work credited to C. S. Lewis, in the main because of its overt sexual content. Although Lewis sympathized with individual friends who struggled with issues of sexual identity, he was openly contemptuous of nonheterosexuals in general, once writing to a friend to complain about “the widespread freemasonry of the highbrow homos who dominate so much of the world of criticism . . .”16 By contrast, The Dark Tower reads like an awkward attempt at pornography. Its victims are a series of handsome, muscular, nearly naked young men; and its villain, a phallocephalic monster that pierces each painfully through the lower spine. After his first day’s sacrifices the Stingingman horrifies his audience by first seeming to gaze back at them through the projection device, then performing a series of solo sex acts for the “camera.” Though the latter suggests Gargantua and Pantagruel, there is nothing Rabelaisian about it: it disgusts the reader as Lewis-the-narrator suggests it disgusted him. Yet he admits that he and the others were transfixed by the sight; significantly, none of them turned away. These supposed heroes, university scholars all, are in the end nothing but common voyeurs—as, if inadvertently so, is the reader.

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Even for a draft, The Dark Tower lacks characterization to a surprising degree. Its protagonist would seem to be Scudamour, a bland young man who remains a background figure until the discovery of his Othertime double. Elwin Ransom, Lewis’s usual science-fiction hero, here appears only as part of a group: this man whose personality was so sharply defined in three novels could change places with any of the others without its making a difference. Even Lewis himself is something of a cipher: the only real character trait given him is a kind of perpetual anxious irritation. Two of The Dark Tower’s players have genuine personalities. One, the cynical (or sensible) Scotsman MacPhee, also plays a prominent role in the final volume of the Space Trilogy. The other, Cyril Knellie,17 is an author of suggestive scholarly works who wanders onto the scene of the experiment and reacts with delight to the artistic quality of what seems to him to be a sort of live erotic entertainment. These are interesting and fairly strong characters but their presence is not enough to carry the story. Biographer A. N. Wilson dismissed this fragmentary novel as, variously, “depressing,” “semi-obscene,” and “one of Lewis’s feebler posthumous works.”18 Fowler took the opposite view, pronouncing it a compulsively readable, even Spenserian story and writing in the Times Literary Supplement that had his friend finished it, “it might have been his best.”19 Le Guin noted that in general, “There’s a good deal of hatred in Lewis, and it is a frightening hatred, because this gentle, brilliant, lovable, devout man never saw the need even to rationalize it, let alone apologize for it.”20 She recognized certain strengths in The Dark Tower that were common to the Space Trilogy volumes, but was of the opinion that the former was “weakened by embarrassingly naive sexual overtones” and that the author was “not in control of his material.”21 David Downing, whose 1992 study Planets in Peril provides the best explication of the Space Trilogy to date, devotes three pages at the end of that work to The Dark Tower. He points out that certain elements of character and setting were later carried out more fully in the third of the series, the dystopic That Hideous Strength (1945): both nightmare societies favor a beetle motif in decoration, for example, and the original Stingingman’s description was reused as that of a decapitated master criminal in the later work. Downing suggests that one reason the author abandoned the project was that the successful works always balanced good and evil in equal portions, but in The Dark Tower he had little to offer “to counterbalance this miserific vision.”22 Kathryn Lindskoog devoted large portions of The C. S. Lewis Hoax and its follow-ups to all that she found suspect about The Dark Tower. She noted multiple similarities between this unpublished ca. 1938 work, three Cold War–era science-fiction films, and Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s fantasy A Wrinkle in Time (1962), and described the findings of “literary detectives” who subjected the Lewis work to computer-based proximity and

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topical analyses. Lindskoog was particularly pleased to report in a later version of having examined the novella’s original manuscript. On the back of the first page was an item seemingly in Lewis’s handwriting: a variation on the first paragraph of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe describing air raids on London and the evacuation of children to safer areas of the country. But, as she noted gleefully, The Dark Tower was dated 1938, two years before Germany began its aerial bombardments of England. On the reverse of the second page was the start of a second, autobiographical work. Its first sentence, in the same pale blue ink used to write “The Man Born Blind,” stated that the author was born in 1946, a date that had been scratched out and replaced with “1898.” Lindskoog triumphantly pointed out that even if this was an innocent mistake, “It seems unlikely that Lewis would have started an autobiography in 1946 on the second page of a manuscript he abandoned in 1938, using ink that did not exist until 1950.”23 Whether her conjectures about this work will prove true in time remains to be seen. The curious are invited to read both The Dark Tower and the scholarship that followed and decide for themselves. The works of fiction are not the only posthumous publications to have come under scrutiny, nor has Lindskoog been their only critic. Scholars are beginning to focus on Lewis’s letters and life-writings and the book introductions and notes written by others. In recent years the latter seem increasingly determined to portray the author as either a saint or, in his younger days at least, a would-be sadist. A. N. Wilson, whose 1990 biography of Lewis was based on interviews with surviving friends and colleagues, confirmed that in their eyes the author was argumentative and bullying. His jolly, red, honest face was that of an intellectual bruiser. He was loud, and he could be coarse. He liked what he called “man’s talk,” and he was frequently contemptuous in his remarks about the opposite sex. He was a heavy smoker—sixty cigarettes a day between pipes—and he liked to drink deep, roaring out his unfashionable views in Oxford bars.24

Which is to say, Jack Lewis was a human being. But, Wilson reported with some puzzlement, it was hard to see that in the biographical introductions to some of the posthumous books, which embellished the writer’s moral sense to an unusual degree. He noted that some of this was the work of U.S. publishers who were afraid that mentions of tobacco and liquor use would offend their hard-line Protestant readership (and added, “one has the strong feeling that this is not so much because they themselves disapprove of the activities as because they need a Lewis who was, against all evidence, a nonsmoker and a lemonade drinker.”25 ) He found even more surprising the published statements by literary executor Walter Hooper that Lewis had lived with Janie Moore for three decades on a purely platonic basis, and that he

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never consummated his four-year marriage to U.S. divorc´ee Joy Davidman Gresham, and even that he had died a virgin. Hooper was at that time a recent convert to Catholicism and Wilson theorized that “for him Lewis has become a sort of Catholic saint, and one can hardly believe in a Catholic saint both of whose sexual relationships were with women who had husbands still living. Therefore, when Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed that he and his wife were lovers . . . he was in fact writing a work of fiction.”26 The executor has since acknowledged Lewis’s normalcy in this area but the earlier statements remain in print and in use as reference materials. The allegations of sadism are curious in that they too originate with the estate. Brief hints in introductions and biographies built over time to the assertion that, under X-ray, shocking passages were visible under scribbles in the author’s early correspondence with Arthur Greeves. These letters were published in 1979 as They Stand Together, with the controversial portions set off in triangular brackets. (In truth, these references are offhand and rather dull, making extensive use of Greek and the code word “That.”) By the time the letters appeared, of course, The Dark Tower had revealed to the reading public that C. S. Lewis was capable of cruel fantasies seemingly fueled by a sublimated libido. After that it was anticlimactic to read that one night at Oxford a certain collegian, befuddled by alcohol, began offering his classmates money to submit to flogging. And perhaps he did just that. Perhaps he did not.27 In any case, the question is, should it matter? Lewis would hardly have been the first British writer to have thought deeply about giving or receiving pain: in fact, it is difficult to find the autobiography of a pre-1970 public school man who does not have something to say on the subject. The majority of these fixations take the negative view: Thackeray, for example, tossed sometimes-gratuitous beating references into his works to express loathing for the school that made his youth a misery. Frederick Marryat, whose novels were still popular schoolboy fare during Lewis’s youth, took a more personal interest: he seemed to enjoy creating extended episodes from different perspectives, often several per book. The most extreme case was the poet Swinburne, whose obsession developed into active sadomasochism and some of whose recreational writings are unlikely ever to appear in a printed “Complete Works.” Even if Lewis had similar unnatural desires in his youth, the point is that he matured beyond them, fully and naturally.28 Stints on the battlefield and in a convalescent hospital opened his eyes to the senselessness of cruelty. University studies, late-night teaching sessions, and the long-term relationship with Janie Moore then filled his hours and kept his thoughts in their proper place. His decision in 1931 to rejoin the Episcopal Church sealed his future and he became the man and the writer we recognize today.

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´ . . . LE DELUGE The steady stream of print publications bearing Lewis’s name has in recent years become a flood. In the first four decades after the author’s death his estate released three new volumes of poetry, four of original Christian and philosophical essays, seven of letters (one of them already in type in 1963), five of literary essays, the all-fiction Dark Tower collection, a truncated edition of the author’s 1920s diaries, and an illustrated compilation of Jack and Warnie Lewis’s Boxen juvenilia, as well as countless repackagings of older material. More recently it has begun issuing slim volumes of thematic extracts from the earlier works, the majority on Christian themes. The simple Oxford don has in the twenty-first century become a one-man theological-literary industry. California gadfly Kathryn Lindskoog had comments to make about many of the new releases. For details, the reader is referred to the third and final version of her book, published in 2001 under the new title Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands. The second version had used footnotes to indicate newer information; by the time the third appeared these took up nearly as much space as the original text. The book’s tone is shrill at times, an understandable fault given that to compile it, its author battled two handicaps: alleged denials of access to primary sources and a growing debilitation due to multiple sclerosis. By the turn of the millennium she was confined to a wheelchair and had to send other researchers to copy archival holdings, sometimes by hand, for her study at home. Lindskoog’s ailment finally claimed her life in 2004. The controversy did not die with her: Lewis scholarship today remains firmly divided by what Wilson had earlier termed the Great Schism. Readers who appreciate this thoughtful, dedicated, and talented author have a great deal to hope for in the coming years. They can hope that “The Quest of Bleharis,” “The Most Substantial People,” and—assuming they still exist—the two juvenile political novels finally make their way into print. They can hope for additional, less heavily edited diary volumes. They can hope that caches of previously unknown letters will be discovered in private attics and public archives. Best of all, they can hope that, when the time is right, the trustees of the Lewis estate will authorize an independent, unbiased research team to conduct tests that establish the validity of the posthumously published works once and for all. A sterling literary reputation is at stake and C. S. Lewis deserves nothing less. NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, “The Shoddy Lands,” in The Dark Tower and Other Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 109.

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2. H. M. Blamires, undated post-1963 letter quoted in Warren H. Lewis, ed. Letters of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 18–19. 3. Ursula K. Le Guin, Review, The Dark Tower and Other Stories. The New Republic 176 (April 16, 1977), 29. 4. True, the highbrow Saturday Review was more typical of Lewis’s taste in periodicals, but he was more likely to have held onto his copy of the pulp for two years afterward, knowing the latter to be a potential story market. 5. Le Guin, Review, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, 30. 6. C. S. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 99. Undated letter from ca. May 16, 1916. 7. Ibid., 126. Letter dated July 25, 1916. 8. W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 6. 9. Ibid. 10. A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Collins, 1990), xv. 11. Owen Barfield, Introduction to Light on C. S. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), xviii. 12. Alastair Fowler, “The Aliens of Othertime,” Review of The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Times Literary Supplement (July 1, 1977), 795. 13. W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 291. 14. Le Guin, Review, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, 29. 15. Fowler, “The Aliens of Othertime,” Review. 795. 16. W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 292. 17. The use of this outdated epithet for an effeminate man is typical of The Dark Tower’s subtlety overall. 18. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, xiv. 19. Fowler, “The Aliens of Othertime,” Review, 795. 20. Le Guin, Review, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, 29. 21. Ibid., 30. 22. David C. Downing, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 161. 23. Kathryn Lindskoog, Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 109. 24. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, xii. 25. Ibid., xvi. 26. Ibid., xvi. 27. The other students must have been just as drunk as he, for none of them ever recalled the event publicly. 28. A sinner in young manhood turned saintly in middle age following a journeyrelated epiphany—it all begins to sound very much like the story of Saul. It will be interesting to note whether some future biography takes exactly this approach, using as evidence the published record of Lewis’s evil thoughts and spiritual reformation. How interesting it would be if the road to Tarsus led in fact to the Whipsnade Zoo!

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barfield, Owen. “Introduction.” In Light on C. S. Lewis. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965, ix–xxi. Downing, David C. “‘The Dungeon of His Soul’: Lewis’s Unfinished ‘Quest of Bleheris.’ ” SEVEN 17 (1998). ———. Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Fowler, Alastair. “The Aliens of Othertime.” Review, The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Times Literary Supplement (July 1, 1977), 795. Le Guin, Ursula K. Review, The Dark Tower and Other Stories. The New Republic (April 16, 1977), 29–30. Lewis, C. S. The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ———. “The Most Substantial People.” Typescript in Volume 9 of Memoirs of the Lewis Family 1850–1930. Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Norton, MA. Copies at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. ———. “The Quest of Bleheris.” ca. 1916. Manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Eng. Lett. c. 220/5 fols. 5–43). Copy at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Norton, MA. ———. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Lewis, W. H., Editor. Letters of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Lindskoog, Kathryn. The C. S. Lewis Hoax. Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1988. ———. The Linden Tree. A Web site with previously published articles about the author’s investigations into the provenance of various Lewis writings. Accessed April 2, 2006, at http://lindentree.org. ———. Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001. London, Jack. The Sea Wolf. New York: Macmillan, 1904. Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. London: Collins, 1990.

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The Screwtape Letters: Telling the Truth Upside Down Devin Brown

“My dear Wormwood.”

So begins one of C. S. Lewis’s most unusual and most successful works: The Screwtape Letters. On May 2, 1941, British readers opened The Guardian, a weekly Anglican religious newspaper, to find the first in a series of thirty-one strange letters that would arrive in weekly installments, claiming to have been written by a senior devil named Screwtape to his nephew, a novice tempter named Wormwood. When the entire collection was published in Britain in 1942 and in the Untied States a year later, The Screwtape Letters became, as Alan Jacobs notes, Lewis’s “first truly popular book.”1 It would propel Lewis to international fame and eventually put him on the cover of Time magazine (September 8, 1947), where he was pictured with a little devil standing on one shoulder. The cover story “Don versus Devil,” a reference to Lewis’s position as an Oxford don, noted that by 1947 all of Lewis’s books added together had sold something over a million copies. Today the number of copies of Screwtape alone stands at several million. The origins for the series of devilish epistles can be found in a letter that Lewis wrote to his brother Warnie, dated July 20, 1940. In it, Lewis tells how the idea came to him one Sunday at church:

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Before the service was over—one could wish these things came more seasonably—I was stuck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would be called As One Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first “patient.” The idea would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.2

Once starting on the project, it did not take Lewis long to finish and find a publisher, with the first installment in The Guardian appearing less than a year after the letter to Warnie. This practice of taking the “other” point of view was a technique Lewis had used previously to great advantage in Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of his Space Trilogy, published in 1939 three years before Screwtape. In one instance, readers find a description of two strange creatures as they approach Ransom, the story’s protagonist. Here Lewis allows readers, through Ransom, to see the two creatures from the point of view of an inhabitant of Mars (whom the natives call Malacandra): They were much shorter than any animal he had yet seen on Malacandra, and he gathered that they were bipeds, though the lower limbs were so thick and sausage-like that he hesitated to call them legs. The bodies were a little narrower at the top than at the bottom so as to be very slightly pear-shaped. . . . Suddenly, with an indescribable change of feeling, he realized that he was looking at men . . . and he, for one privileged moment, had seen the human form with almost Malacandrian eyes.3

Lewis would again turn to this technique of presenting a story from the other point of view, nine years after Screwtape. In Prince Caspian (1951) he would place the four Pevensie children in the position of feeling what it is like to be the ones who are called by Susan’s magic horn rather than being the ones calling for help. In an essay on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings titled, “The Dethronement of Power,” Lewis points out the need humans have to penetrate what he calls “the veil of familiarity” so that we can see more clearly “all the things we know.”4 While the impact Lewis achieves by showing events from the other point of view is always striking, he did not invent this literary technique. It can be seen in works such as Gulliver’s Travels, a book that Lewis labels as one of his favorites in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.5 In one memorable illustration of this practice, Swift allows readers see the contents of Gulliver’s pockets through the eyes of the Lilliputians. Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist critic, coined the term defamiliarization to describe this technique of making the familiar strange in order to counter the deadening effect of habit and by doing so forcing a greater awareness. Certainly Lewis’s choice to write from a devil’s perspective in Screwtape, his decision to tell the truth

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upside down, adds poignancy and power to his depiction of the psychology of human temptation. As in the fourth book of Paradise Lost, where Milton has Satan declare, “Evil, be thou my good,” a similar reversal of perspective is throughout Screwtape. As Mark Deforrest has pointed out, an awareness of this other point of view used by Lewis is “crucial to understanding the content of the letters.”6 Thus “the Enemy” in the story is Screwtape’s way of referring to God. What Screwtape calls “Our Father’s House” is of course, Hell, not Heaven. Deforrest concludes, “Thus to really understand the book, it is necessary to keep in mind that what Screwtape sees as good is really negative, and what are setbacks for him are actually victories in the struggle against evil.”7 Or as Jocelyn Easton Gibb notes, “Screwtape’s whites are our blacks and whatever he welcomes we should dread.”8 One would think this point hardly needed mentioning. However in the preface to the 1961 edition of Screwtape, Lewis relates the story of the country clergyman who wrote a letter to the editor canceling his subscription to The Guardian complaining that “much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical.”9 In the original 1942 preface, found in most modern editions of Screwtape, Lewis warns, “Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.”10 When Screwtape’s potential dishonesty is compounded with the fact that his perspective is, for us, inverted, the exact point that Lewis wants to make in each passage may from time to time be obscured. Fortunately, many of the topics in Screwtape are explored from the more normal perspective and refined and elaborated on in other books which Lewis produced—in works written around the same time, such as the Broadcast Talks (1941–1942), which would eventually be published as Mere Christianity (1952), and in works that Lewis would pen much later, such as Letters to Malcolm (1964). OF DEVILS AND INFLUENCES When Lewis expressed his views on devils in his 1942 preface, he explained there are two equal and opposite errors that humans can make concerning devils: “One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”11 Interestingly, the villains from the first two Chronicles of Narnia can be seen as examples of the two types of evils mentioned here by Lewis. The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe could be described as an evil magician. King Miraz from Prince Caspian is equally

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bad as a materialist. Nineteen years later, in the preface to the 1961 edition, Lewis felt it worthwhile to answer some of the questions that Screwtape had raised in the minds of readers in the two decades since its publication. The most frequent question, Lewis reports, was whether or not he really believed in the Devil. Lewis’s response is somewhat nuanced. First, he points out: “Now, if by ‘the Devil’ you mean a power opposite to God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain a ‘perfect badness’ opposite to the perfect goodness of God.”12 Lewis goes on to explain that the proper question is whether he believes in devils. He elaborates, “I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils.”13 He also distinguishes between his belief in angels, both good and evil, and his disbelief in demonic creatures with bird wings or bat wings, representations that he considered purely symbolic and not particularly helpful. Lewis makes his own beliefs very clear in the 1961 preface, but he adds, “The question of my own opinion about devils, though proper to be answered when once it was raised, is really of very minor importance for a reader of Screwtape.”14 He states that readers who share his beliefs will see the devils in Screwtape as symbols of a concrete reality. Readers who do not will see Wormwood and Screwtape as personifications of abstractions, and for these readers the book will be an allegory. Either way, Lewis claims it makes little difference, for the book was not written in order to speculate about devils but “to throw light from a new angle on the life of men.”15 Lewis’s extensive reading would have provided him with many insights into the Devil. Lewis’s first epigram in Screwtape is the advice of Martin Luther: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” The second epigram, a line quoted from Thomas More, indicates the Devil’s besetting sin is his “prowde spirite,” a pride of self-importance that “cannot endure to be mocked.” In Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost, which began as a series of lectures given in 1941, the same year Screwtape’s letters began appearing in The Guardian, he points out that Satan suffered from “a sense of injur’d merit,”16 a description taken directly from Milton. Lewis then expands on this point, noting, “In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige.”17 In choosing to open with the quotes from Luther and More, Lewis reveals his intention in writing The Screwtape Letters is to use satire and mocking to “drive out the devil.” The best weapons against the deadly seriousness with which the devils view themselves, Lewis suggests, are humor and ridicule and reading the letters partly as exercises in humor is key to appreciating them. It is

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most likely that Lewis was influenced by the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton, whom Lewis greatly admired, to use humor and laughter in Screwtape. In Lewis’s 1961 preface, he refers to Chesterton’s suggestion in Orthodoxy that Satan “fell by the force of gravity.”18 Lewis continues with the observation, “We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”19 By contrast, as Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy, “A characteristic of great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”20 A related use of humor in another Lewis work is in “Rabadash the Ridiculous,” the final chapter of The Horse and His Boy (1954), in which ridicule is used to deflate a Calormen Prince who has a similarly exaggerated sense of self-importance. Lewis dedicated The Screwtape Letters (1942) to J. R. R. Tolkien, whom he first met at Oxford in 1926 and who persuaded Lewis to take the Christian story seriously, as fact and not mere myth. As Alan Jacobs has observed, there would come a point when Tolkien would dislike the tenor of Lewis’s Christian works, a view that “stemmed from the insistence of Tolkien’s Catholic tradition on the very different roles of clergy and laity.”21 However, there does not seem to be much indication that Tolkien had any problems with Screwtape. In fact, as Colin Duriez points out, “There was much that Tolkien liked of The Screwtape Letters. . . . His letters at the time often reflect concepts explored in Screwtape.”22 It is clear Tolkien never forgot Screwtape had been dedicated to him. In a letter written to his son Michael in November 1963, shortly after Lewis’s death, Tolkien complained about the numerous inaccuracies in the published obituaries. Among the misrepresentations that Tolkien notes is the suggestion by the Daily Telegraph that Lewis was never that fond of The Screwtape Letters, a claim clearly untrue. Tolkien concludes ironically with the observation, “He dedicated it to me. I wondered why. Now I know—says they.”23 Letters 1 to 3: Reason, the New Convert, and His Mother Lewis’s friend and biographer George Sayer rightly argues that Screwtape “brilliantly combines spiritual profundity and a remarkable psychological understanding.”24 A. N. Wilson claims that The Screwtape Letters brings into literary use qualities that Lewis had possessed to a highly developed degree since adolescence, among them Lewis’s “ability to see through human failings,” his “capacity to analyze other people’s annoyingness,” and his “rich sense of comedy and satire.”25 From the very first letter, evidence to support Sayer’s and Wilson’s favorable evaluations appears in abundance, making it clear why Screwtape is many readers’ favorite work by C. S. Lewis.

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The first letter begins with Screwtape admonishing Wormwood not to think that reading or argument is the way to keep his patient “out of the Enemy’s clutches.”26 Lewis here is drawing from his own experience, for, in fact, he was moved closer to Christian beliefs by both of these activities as he relates in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”27 When Lewis was thirty-two, it was argument, meaning a reasoned discussion, which played a pivotal role in changing his beliefs. On the night of September 19, 1931, Lewis had invited Tolkien and Hugo Dyson to dine with him at his college, and they talked well into the night about Christianity. Soon after that night, Lewis professed belief not in just God but in the claims of Jesus Christ, and it was that night of “argument” with Tolkien and Dyson that proved instrumental in guiding Lewis along his path toward becoming one of the world’s greatest writers of Christian apologetics. Screwtape also notes in the first letter that Wormwood’s patient is not in the practice of evaluating a doctrine on the basis of whether it is true or false, but rather by whether it is academic or practical, outworn or contemporary, and the senior devil urges his nephew to keep the focus on this kind of jargon. As with the previous points about reading and argument, here again Lewis was drawing from his own experience. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis calls attention to a condition he calls “chronological snobbery,” which he describes as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”28 Later in Screwtape, in Letter 27, Screwtape will expand on the issue of chronological snobbery, calling it the Historical Point of View. As Screwtape explains to Wormwood: Put briefly, [it] means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers. . . . To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.29

Lewis said he suffered from this malady until the helpful “counterattacks” from his friend Owen Barfield freed him from this view forever, and one can see how Lewis would want The Screwtape Letters to be of similar value for his readers.

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In Screwtape’s opening letter, Lewis makes his position clear: Christians are not to be afraid of reasoned discussions about the faith, for as Screwtape warns, argument “moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground.”30 Lewis uses the prominence of the opening sentence in the first letter to counter the fear some Christians have that argument or further reading leads to a loss of faith. He makes the same point in Mere Christianity where he asks, “If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?”31 With this emphasis on the positive relationship between reading and argument and the Christian faith, Lewis also responds to the notion that one could or should become a Christian despite his reason. In Mere Christianity Lewis makes his position very clear, stating, “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.”32 Lewis would return to the vital role of reason and logical argument a decade later when writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When the Professor hears of Lucy’s claim to have visited an imaginary world, he reminds Peter and Susan that they have no rational grounds for presuming Lucy’s account is untrue. “Logic!” he complains, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”33 In Screwtape’s second letter we learn that Wormwood’s patient has become a Christian. Screwtape points out to his young charge this is no call to despair because hundreds of similar converts have been reclaimed after “a brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp.”34 According to Screwtape, one of the devils’ greatest allies in leading these believers to abandon their newfound faith is the Church itself, by which he means the patient’s local congregation, and not the church universal, which he describes as “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity,” a spectacle that Screwtape admits “makes our boldest tempters uneasy.”35 Lewis includes several penetrating insights in this second letter, one of which relates to a topic that he would later describe in Surprised by Joy as “the false identification which some people make of refinement with virtue.”36 Screwtape suggests that at his local church the newly Christian patient will encounter the very neighbors he has previously avoided; and provided that any of those neighbors “sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes,” Wormwood’s patient will quite easily, though erroneously, conclude that their religion “must therefore be somehow ridiculous.”37 Readers who know of Lewis’s dislike for poor church singing—he typically attended the 8 a.m. service to avoid the 10:30 a.m. Sung Eucharist—may wonder if the first prejudice in the list had, at least for a time, been one of which Lewis himself was guilty.

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Lewis’s own admission of sins gives us good reason to look at his experience as the origins for many of Screwtape’s ideas for temptations. In the 1961 preface, with a reference to Psalm 36:1, Lewis points out: Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forget that there is an equally reliable, thought less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. “My heart”—I need no other’s—“showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.”38

Screwtape moves on to the topic of how the patient’s moods will certainly change, urging Wormwood to work hard on the disappointment or anticlimax that the elder devil assures will come to the patient during his first few weeks as a Christian. Screwtape will return to this topic in Letter 8, where he will call this pattern the Law of Undulation, a condition of continually changing “troughs and peaks,” which for humans is the “nearest approach to constancy.”39 In Mere Christianity, Lewis explored the topic of peaks and troughs and defined faith as “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”40 Screwtape concludes with the warning that if Christians are able to get through this initial period of dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on their feelings and therefore become much harder to tempt. In the final paragraph of the second letter, Lewis raises an issue that modern readers may puzzle over. Screwtape has instructed Wormwood to encourage his patient’s belief that the religion of the people in the next pew is somehow dubious or ridiculous because of irrelevant external elements such as their appearance. Screwtape advises Wormwood that he must also exploit any valid grounds the patient may think he has for assuming a holier-than-thou attitude toward his commonplace neighbors; for example if it turns out that the churchgoer with the squeaky boots is also a miser or an extortioner. Then by way of another illustration, Screwtape proposes the possibility that “the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge player.”41 Why Lewis places fanatical bridge playing alongside miserly behavior and extortion is not immediately clear. In an essay titled “An Approach to Teaching The Screwtape Letters,” Marvin Hinten wonders about Lewis’s choice of illustration: “Personally, I dislike the example; since when is excessive playing bridge on a par with illegal activities like extortion? But my students usually defend the example, bringing in Scriptures such as I Corinthians 10:23 about lawfulness vs. helpfulness. This year they meandered into how a person can actually tell if they are ‘fanatical’ about something.”42 Lewis mentions bridge playing and fanaticism again in the following passage from Mere Christianity, which may help to place Screwtape’s comments in clearer context. In a chapter about the cardinal virtues, Lewis writes:

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One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the center of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as “intemperate” as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.43

Certainly most believers would agree that the commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” was meant to include all activities, not just one’s normally thought of sins. As Screwtape will point out near the close of Letter 12, “It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.”44 In Letter 3, Screwtape urges Wormwood to encourage the minor annoyances between the patient and his mother, what he calls the “daily pinpricks.” Readers who have been expecting the clash between good and evil—the battle against principalities and powers mentioned in Ephesians 6:12—to be somewhat more majestic may be surprised to find Screwtape’s emphasis on aspects as mundane as the odd clothes and double chins mentioned in Letter 2 and the “tones of voice and expressions of face” discussed here. However, these elements are in keeping with Screwtape’s counsel to keep the patient’s mind off “the most elementary duties” and focused on only “the most advanced and spiritual ones.” (It is worth noting that if commonplace, ordinary annoyances prove useful in keeping the patient from the Enemy, Lewis will later suggest that common pleasures also do the same work. In Letter 13, after a temporary turn away from the faith, the patient will experience a genuine repentance and renewal, which begins with the simple pleasures of taking a walk through some country that he really likes and reading a book that he really enjoys.) Screwtape’s specific pieces of advice in Letter 3 about guiding the patient’s relations with his mother—suggestions such as having the patient demand that his utterances must all be taken at face value, judged simply on his actual words, while at the same time he will judge his mother’s utterance with the broadest and the most oversensitive interpretation possible45 —are part of a general strategy of a double standard, or hypocrisy, one that the patient is to remain completely unaware of. As Lewis observes elsewhere, “Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.”46 Vital to the double standard and hypocrisy encouraged in the patient will be a complete lack of capacity for self-criticism. Screwtape urges that he must be brought to the point where he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any

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of the flaws clear to anyone who has lived or worked with him for fifteen minutes. For much of his adult life, Lewis lived with and cared for an older woman named Mrs. Moore, the mother of a wartime friend. Shortly after Lewis’s conversion, we find this short comment about Mrs. Moore in Warnie’s diary: “She nags Jack about having become a believer.”47 An echo of this situation appears in Screwtape’s words in the final paragraph of Letter 3 where Screwtape says, “Tell me something about the old lady’s religious position. Is she at all jealous of the new factor in her son’s life?”48 Green and Hooper, while acknowledging that Lewis would have been aware of “many instances where mothers resented their children becoming Christians,” go on to point out that it is hard to reject the idea that Lewis had Mrs. Moore in mind in his portrait of the patient’s mother.49 Whether the mother in Screwtape comes from personal experience or not, Lewis would return to this topic of family jealousy again in The Four Loves (1960), observing, “Few things in the ordinary peacetime life of a civilized country are more nearly fiendish than the rancor with which a whole unbelieving family will turn on the one member of it who has become a Christian.”50 Letters 4 to 6: Prayer, the Outbreak of War, and Maximum Uncertainty Screwtape turns to the topic of prayer in his fourth letter. He tells Wormwood to remind the patient of the “parrot-like” prayers of his childhood, so that in reaction he will turn to prayers that are “entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised.”51 Readers at this point might mistakenly conclude that Lewis is arguing for ready-made prayers and against using one’s own words. However, Screwtape’s purpose for advocating personal prayers here is to move the patient toward a focus on producing “a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part,” in which the patient is to estimate the value of each of his prayers by his “success in producing the desired feeling.” 52 Another goal is for Wormwood’s patient to think he can practice the prayer of silence that only those who are very far in the Enemy’s service can achieve. In Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, another one of Lewis’s collection of fictional letters, published in 1964, the year after Lewis’s death, he writes a similar passage of advice on prayer: For many years after my conversion I never used any ready-made forms except the Lord’s Prayer. In fact I tried to pray without words at all. . . . I still think the prayer without words is best—if one can really achieve it. But I now see that in trying to make it my daily bread I was counting on a greater mental and spiritual strength than I really have. To pray successfully without words one needs to be “at the top

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of one’s form.” Otherwise the mental acts become merely imaginative or emotional acts—and a fabricated emotion is a miserable affair.53

If the patient cannot be taken in with the suggestion that he can successfully practice the prayer of silence, Screwtape urges Wormwood to at least persuade him that “bodily position makes no difference.”54 In another letter to Malcolm, we find an elaboration on Screwtape’s point: On a day of traveling . . . I’d rather pray sitting in a crowded train than put it off till midnight when one reaches a hotel bedroom with aching head and dry throat and one’s mind partly in a stupor and partly in a whirl. On other, and slightly less crowded, days a bench in a park, or a back street where one can pace up and down, will do. . . . When one prays in strange places and at strange times one can’t kneel, to be sure. I won’t say this doesn’t matter. The body ought to pray as well as the soul. Body and soul are both the better for it. . . . The relevant point is that kneeling does matter, but other things matter even more. A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.55

In Letters 5 and 6 readers learn that “the European humans have started another of their wars,”56 a fact that Screwtape warns Wormwood should not hope for too much from the patient because the war may also lead to thousands “turning in this tribulation to the Enemy” and even more turning to values and causes bigger than themselves. “How disastrous for us,” Screwtape laments, “is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces.”57 Lewis, who had served and been wounded in the first World War, had small need himself to be reminded of his own mortality by another conflict. Near the start of the second Great War, he wrote in a letter to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, “My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years . . . I think death would be much better than to live through another war . . . I do not doubt that whatever misery He permits will be for our ultimate good unless, by rebellious will, we convert it to evil.”58 Screwtape suggests in Letter 6 that it is preferable to be “possible, but by no means certain” that the young man will be called up for service in the military, this way the patient will be in a position of maximum uncertainly and, according to Screwtape, so full of anxiety that his mind will be barricaded against the Enemy. The senior devil reminds Wormwood, “Our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” 59 In the last paragraph of Letter 6, Screwtape points out there will be benevolence as well as malice in the patient’s soul and advises Wormwood to direct the malice to the patient’s immediate neighbors and to focus the benevolence on people he does not know. This way, “the malice becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”60 Here Lewis provides an upside-down version of the famous statement that Jonathan Swift made in a letter to his friend Alexander Pope: “I hate and detest that animal called man, although

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I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”61 Here Wormwood is to encourage his patient to imagine that he loves mankind in general, but all the while loathing his actual neighbors. Letters 7 to 9: Encouraging Factions, Peaks and Troughs, Pleasures and Phases One of the advantages in writing a work of fictional epistles such as The Screwtape Letters is that it allows its author to wander from topic to topic at will, in the way that actual letters might. And so from time to time, Lewis addresses more than one subject in a single letter without a direct connection between the various topics. Letter 7 begins with the question of whether Wormwood’s patient should know of his tempter’s existence. Screwtape declares, “Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves.”62 The problem with making their presence known, Screwtape notes, is that it does not allow the possibility of the humans staying materialists, at least not yet. The elder tempter goes on to outline the hope that a belief in and even a worship of devils can be cultivated under different names. Here, Screwtape suggests that the Life Force, the worship of sex, and certain aspects of Psychoanalysis may “prove useful.” While devils in Screwtape remain hidden until the patient’s moment of death, Lewis presents fictional manifestations of the demons in the second and third volumes of his space trilogy, books that he began immediately after Screwtape. In Perelandra (1943), Ransom must battle Weston who has become possessed by the Devil or by devils, and becomes, as Ransom calls him, an Un-man. In That Hideous Strength (1945), devils are present in the form of what are called dark eldils. In Screwtape’s final comments on concealment, readers find one of Lewis’s most powerful insights. Should any suspicion of Wormwood’s existence arise in the patient’s mind, Screwtape urges him to suggest to the patient “a picture of something in red tights” and to persuade him that “since he cannot believe in that . . . he therefore cannot believe in you.”63 In the preface to the 1961 edition Lewis makes much the same point about the misrepresentation of angels, citing the “chubby infantile nudes of Raphael” and the soft, girlish angels of later artists.64 Lewis reminds us that in scripture an appearance by an angel is always terrifying and so is typically accompanied by the command, “Fear not.” Presumably an appearance by a fallen angel would be even more terrifying, and would produce the very opposite effect than seeing a comic red-costumed character with a pitchfork would. Screwtape’s also notes in Letter 7 that he supports all causes, extremes, divisions, and factions as a means to promote division, pride, and hatred,

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and to distract the patient from the real purposes for which these things exist: “Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours.”65 Lewis was not opposed to such things, but thought they should be kept in their proper place. This idea of ordinate loves was a concept Lewis got from St. Augustine and one that he explored in a number of works. In Letters to Malcolm Lewis observes, “Our deepest concern should be for the first things, and our next deepest for second things, and so on down to zero—to the total absence of concern for things that are not really good, nor means to good at all.”66 In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis argues, “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.”67 Letter 8 begins with Wormwood’s hope that “the patient’s religious phase is dying away”, a mistaken conclusion that opens the door for Screwtape to elaborate on the law of Undulation, the topic of troughs and peaks first touched on in Letter 2. Here the senior devil explains that the spiritual dryness and dullness the patient has been experiencing is not the result of Wormwood’s workmanship but is a natural phenomenon, similar to the undulation found in every department of human life. According to Screwtape, the danger of this period of spiritual dryness comes in the use the Enemy wants to make of it. Screwtape warns that it is during this kind of trough period, much more than during the peak times, that Wormwood’s patient has the greatest opportunity to grow into “the sort of creature He wants it to be.”68 In the next letter, Screwtape will add four additional pieces of advice for using these periods of spiritual dryness to the devils’ advantage. First, Wormwood is to encourage the patient to assume that his first feelings of excitement should have lasted forever, and second, that his present dryness is “an equally permanent condition.”69 Third, Wormwood is told to keep the patient away from experienced Christians, and finally is advised to get his patient working on recovering his old feelings by sheer will power. Letter 9 also explores some specific activities Wormwood is to promote during the trough times. According to Screwtape, the times of dullness provide excellent opportunity for sensual temptations, and sex and drink are listed as specific examples. Because these actions relate to abusing proper pleasures, which are healthy, and normal, and satisfying, Screwtape’s plan is to encourage humans “to take the pleasures that our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees which He has forbidden.” In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, readers can see the enjoyment of a proper pleasure in the scene where Lucy has tea with Mr. Tumnus and also later in the delicious meal the children have with the Beavers. However, a proper pleasure is taken to an excessive degree when Edmund devours an entire box of Turkish Delight.

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Letter 9 concludes with the suggestion that since the patient’s initial excitement is now gone, he must think of his faith as a phase rather than as something that is either true or false, and better yet if he thinks of it as an “adolescent” phase, part of his progress and development, but a stage that he is now too mature for.70 Letters 10 to 12: New Acquaintances, Kinds of Laughter, and A Gradual Falling Off In Letter 9, Wormwood was urged to keep his patient out of the way of experienced Christians. Now in Letter 10, we find the reverse to this advice. Screwtape is delighted that Wormwood’s man has made the acquaintance of a middle-aged married couple who are just the sort of people Screwtape wants him to know since they are wealthy, smart, superficially intellectual, and “brightly skeptical about everything,” the kind who belittle “anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.”71 Particularly helpful will be fact that this couple, unlike the unsophisticated churchgoers the patient encountered in Letter 2, will easily appeal to his social, sexual, and intellectual vanity. Screwtape foresees that when the patient is with these new acquaintances, the patient will connive: he will be silent when he should speak, and laugh when he should be silent. Soon he will assume first by manner and then by words “all sorts of cynical and skeptical attitudes,” which are not really his, at least not yet—if assumed long enough they will become his own—for, as Screwtape argues, “All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be,”72 a claim worth further reflecting upon. The critical point here seems to be Screwtape’s exact use of the word pretending. In Mere Christianity Lewis clarifies this point and notes that by pretending, he does not mean acting hypocritically: Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him . . . There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, . . . you will probably be disappointed.73

In Letter 11 Screwtape announces that he is glad to hear that the patient is now associating with the two friends’ whole set of acquaintances, a group of “consistent scoffers” who are not guilty of any “spectacular” crimes but instead are progressing “quietly and comfortably towards Our Father’s house.”74 As Wormwood’s patient is more and more influenced by this new group of unbelievers, Screwtape’s strategy will be one of gradualness, a policy he will

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expand on in the next letter. For the remainder of Letter 11, Screwtape explores the causes of human laughter with joy being the least favorable to the devils’ cause and flippancy the most helpful in building up “amour-plating against the Enemy” (p. 56). Screwtape does not understand joy and cannot really explain it: he can only note that it is present when friends or lovers get together on the eve of a holiday. Screwtape comprehends flippancy, laughter’s lowest form, much better. With flippancy every serious subject is discussed as though it were ridiculous. Lewis’s point in this epistle seems to be that human laughter and levity can have heavenly origins or origins that are quite the opposite. In Letter 12, Screwtape is concerned that Wormwood’s patient may become aware that he has taken real steps away from his faith. He warns that this change of spiritual direction must always be gradual and always appear revocable. To this end, Screwtape is glad that the man is still going to church, for as long as he retains the external habits of a Christian, he can still be made to erroneously think of himself as someone who has merely “adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was.”75 Screwtape points out that the patient will undoubtedly experience a feeling of “dim uneasiness” about his state, a sensation that, if Wormwood is not careful, may have opposite results. Should the feeling get too strong, it may waken the patient to his condition. However, if, as Screwtape advises, it remains in the background, it can actually lead to a “reluctance to think about the Enemy”76 much in the same way that a person in financial trouble would be reluctant to think about his checking account, eventually causing the patient to dislike religious duties he formerly relished. If this condition of dim uneasiness can be more fully established, Screwtape describes how it can then lead to a condition of increasing misery, when the man’s attention will then wander, and his prayers, work, and even his sleep will deteriorate. In one of Lewis’s most perceptive observations about a life of sin, Screwtape concludes, “All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return.”77 Letter 12 concludes with the patient started on the gradual road to Hell, which Screwtape describes as “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”78 Letters 13 to 15: A Return to Grace, Regarding Humility, and Staying Future-Focused In Letter 13 Screwtape responds to the news that Wormwood has let the man experience repentance and a return to the faith, which for the devils is “a defeat of the first order.”79 There is a heightening of the conflict between

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the two, and Screwtape implies there will consequences for Wormwood’s blunder. As a subplot to the patient’s story, this conflict between Screwtape and Wormwood will slowly escalate over the remainder of the letters and will serve as an illustration of the dog-eat-dog, competitive mentality of Hell, which Screwtape will describe in Letter 18. Notwithstanding Screwtape’s previous claim that the man will be increasingly unable to enjoy normal pleasures, the patient has found delight in reading a book and taking a walk. This discrepancy with what Screwtape had predicted suggests an intervention, a counterattack, by the patient’s good angels. Screwtape informs Wormwood that these two real pleasures killed by contrast “all the trumpery,” which he had been teaching his patient to value, and brought him to a sense of recovery, of coming home again. Screwtape claims, “Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way.”80 According to Screwtape, God values human distinctness and, unlike the devils, seeks to preserve it. God’s idea of detachment means abandoning self-will, not their unique personalities and individual tastes. Letter 13 concludes with Screwtape urging that the important thing for Wormwood is not to let the patient do anything, not to let him convert the recent repentance into action. Screwtape advises Wormwood to let him wallow in his repentance, even better, to write a book about it. The letter concludes with the probing assertion: “The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act.”81 Letter 14 begins with what may be a surprise for readers: Screwtape is disappointed that Wormwood’s patient, now that he has returned to the faith, is not making promises of perpetual virtue, as he originally did at his conversion. Screwtape ruefully observes that the man is now humbly asking only for the “daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation.”82 Screwtape’s solution for the patient’s genuine humility is to have Wormwood draw his attention to it and to encourage him to have pride at his own humbleness. Should this not work, Wormwood is encouraged to twist humility, a virtue, into its dark version, self-contempt—a misstep that then can be gradually extended into contempt for others. This transformation of humility into self-contempt runs counter to the Enemy’s goal. As Screwtape notes, “He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself ) as glorious and excellent things.”83 Lewis’s healthy expression of self-worth here is one of his most timely statements, sounding as though it could have been written yesterday, rather than in 1940. In a letter dated June 20, 1952, Lewis echoes his position here, writing: “I would prefer to combat the ‘I’m special’ feeling not by the thought ‘I’m no more special than anyone else,’ but by the feeling ‘Everyone is as special as me.’”84

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Letter 15 opens with the news that there is a lull in the war, which has produced a similar calm in the patient’s anxieties. Screwtape returns to and expands on his policy of keeping the patient focused on the future, which was seen earlier in Letter 6 in his strategy of maximum uncertainty. Screwtape points out that the Enemy wants humans to attend to eternity and the present. “Our business,” he declares to Wormwood, “is to get them away the eternal, and from the Present.”85 Screwtape further notes that, of course, the Enemy does want humans to think of the future in order to plan for acts of justice or charity. But according to Screwtape, “This is now straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do.”86 Letters 16 to 18: Church Shopping, Gluttony, and Sexual Temptation Screwtape is critical of the fact that the patient is still attending the same church as when he started attending church and declares, “If a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him” (p. 81). For all of his Christian life, Lewis, attended the same Anglican church in the Oxford suburb of Headington Quarry, a few blocks from his home. In this he was following the parochial principle, which Screwtape objects to here, since it “brings together people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires” (p. 81). Much better, Screwtape suggests, is the congregational principle, which makes each church more like a club or faction. Lewis’s point about critiquing churches is somewhat nuanced. On the one hand, the churchgoer may, and in fact should, be critical if what he is rejecting is “false or unhelpful,” but at the same time he is to remain open to any nourishment available. Having made this point, Lewis, through Screwtape, appraises two churches: the first has a vicar whose unbelief astonishes his parishioners, rather than the reverse; the second has a pastor who preaches hatred-filled sermons intended “to shock, grieve, puzzle, or humiliate his parents and their friends.”87 Certainly Lewis is not advocating remaining at the local parish church if the doctrines preached there are false, but exactly which set of aspects could be included under Lewis’s heading of “unhelpful” is not entirely clear. In Letters to Malcolm there is a partial elaboration. Lewis argues that “mere inadequacy” is not a valid excuse for church hopping and offers several examples of elements, which would be invalid reasons for leaving, including “an ugly church, a gawky server, or a badly turned-out celebrant.”88 But Screwtape mentions “candles and clothes and what not” as elements which, under his plan, could serve to send the patient looking for a church more suitable to his tastes. In Letter 17 readers learn that the patient’s mother suffers from an inordinate focus not on the quantity of food but on its quality, a condition

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Screwtape calls the gluttony of Delicacy. Screwtape notes how gluttony, once one of the seven deadly sins, is now considered neither deadly nor even a sin by most Christians. The patient’s mother is kept completely unaware of her selfishness: she “never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.”89 Just as the patient has Wormwood assigned to tempt him, the mother has a devil named Glubose who has led her into a condition of greed, which Screwtape labels the “All-I-want” state of mind. Knowing that Christians, and humans in general, have a tendency to gravitate toward one extreme or the other, Lewis next charts a course away from both an ascetic renunciation of all pleasures, the view that enjoying the pleasures of life is somehow sinful in and of itself, and a gluttonous insistence that one’s sensual desires always be satisfied. In Mere Christianity Lewis argues that the devil “always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites,” and that the solution is to “go straight through between both errors.”90 So how is one to know when proper enjoyment has crossed the line into unwarranted love or enslavement? The key can be found in Screwtape’s suggestion to have the denial of any of the pleasures the patient likes be enough to “put him out.” When an unmet physical desire results in a loss of charity, justice, or obedience, the enjoyment has gone beyond its proper bounds. In Letter 18, as part of his discussion of sexual temptation, Screwtape contrasts “love” with “being in love” and the philosophies of Hell on this topic with the philosophies of Heaven. From the perspective of Hell, there can be no love; there can be no gain without someone else’s loss, for “to be” means “to be in competition.” Readers have already been given glimpses of this state of everpresent rivalry through the underlying antagonistic relationship between Screwtape and Wormwood. The senior devil explains that in order for a physical object to expand it must push aside or absorb whatever objects are in its way, and claims the same is true for beings. Screwtape is interested in “the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger,” but in Heaven, the opposite principle prevails: “The good of one self is to be the good of another,” 91 although Screwtape insists that this philosophy of the Enemy is merely an attempt to evade the obvious truth of the competitive nature of existence. Screwtape observes that the Enemy’s plan involves contradiction: “Things are to be many, yet somehow one,” and gives the example of how sexual desire and the family are results of what the Enemy calls love. Letters 19 to 21: Love, Sexuality, and My Time Is My Own The Devil’s fundamental principle, as Screwtape explains in Letter 19, is “all selves are by their very nature in competition,” which leads to the conclusion

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that all the Enemy’s talk about love “must be a disguise for something else.”92 Screwtape’s dilemma is he cannot comprehend anything beyond competition and greed as motivation, and yet at the same time his observations lead him to conclude, “He really loves the human vermin and really desires their freedom and continued existence,”93 a conclusion he then attempts to back away from lest he be accused of heresy. Screwtape is at a loss to understand the Enemy’s real motive but he recognizes that this lack of understanding is the very problem that caused the original break between Satan and God. In Letter 20 readers learn that Wormwood’s attacks on the patient’s chastity have been thwarted by the Enemy, presumably with the help of the patient’s guardian angels whose efforts are pointed out in the final letter. Screwtape immediately switches his focus. “If we can’t use his sexuality to make him unchaste,” he urges Wormwood, “we must try to use it for the promotion of a desirable marriage,”94 and, of course, desirable here means undesirable from the patient’s perspective. In Letter 21, when Screwtape turns to the topic of “My Time is My Own,” it is significant that immediately following an attack on the patient’s chastity comes an attack on the patient’s “peevishness.” The patient has committed, at least in theory, to “a total service of the Enemy” and yet if minor interruptions to what he falsely claims as “his” day are enough to “throw him out of gear” then the patient will be distracted from the Enemy. This is in keeping with Screwtape’s point from Letter 12 that it does not matter how small the sin is, provided that the cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light. If not by a “great” sin of sexual immorality, then Screwtape would be equally happy if “lesser” sins did the job. Letters 22 to 24: In Love, Corrupting Christian Influence, and Spiritual Pride The patient has fallen in love with a girl, readers learn in Letter 22, in fact, with a Christian girl, who is not at all to Screwtape’s liking, particularly since, while she appears to be timid and meek, she is in fact courageous and witty. Worst of all, Screwtape laments, is that she is “the sort of creature who’d find ME funny!”95 a response in harmony with the Luther epigram declaring that the devil cannot bear scorn. Careful readers might conclude that this relationship has come about as a result of an equally intense effort by the patient’s good angels to counter Wormwood’s attempts to encourage a “desirable” marriage proscribed earlier in Letter 20. (In the final letter when the patient sees these guardian angels, he will realize how they have been instrumental in shaping his life.) The disturbing thought of the sensual delights, which the patient and his girl will properly enjoy, leads Screwtape to return to the topic of the Enemy’s

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use of pleasures, touched on previously in Letter 9. Here Screwtape rants against the fact that at the Enemy’s right hand are “pleasures for evermore,” a reference to Psalms 16:11, and that for the devils to make use of anything they have to twist it. To counter the non-Christian friends and their associates, the patient’s guardian angels have brought him into contact not only with a Christian girl but also with her family, and, as seen in the next letter, with their entire circle of Christian friends as well. Screwtape complains of a deadly odor, which surrounds the house, giving it a resemblance of heaven and sending him into an even deeper rant. At the end of his outbursts, Screwtape suddenly turns on Wormwood with the words, “Meanwhile you, disgusting little,”96 and then there is a break in the writing. Presumably Screwtape is about to lash out at his apprentice for his failures in keeping the patient from the Christian girl and her family, antagonism that will continue to increase. But when the narrative resumes, Screwtape does not finish his thoughts about Wormwood, but instead explains the reason for the break. Screwtape claims that he inadvertently allowed himself to assume the form of a centipede, but the implication is that this change in form has come as chastisement from God. At the close of Letter 22, Screwtape mentions a modern writer “with a name like Pshaw” who has understood the real truth behind Screwtape’s change; rather than punishment, Screwtape’s transformation should be viewed as a manifestation of the Life Force. Here Lewis is referring to George Bernard Shaw, a modern philosopher he elaborates on in the chapter “What Lies Behind the Law” from Mere Christianity. There Lewis notes that so far he has discussed only the Materialist and the Religious views, and then further describes Shaw’s beliefs: But to be complete I ought to mention the In-between view called Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or emergent Evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw. . . . People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet “evolved” from the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance but to the “striving” or “purposiveness” of a Life-Force.97

Screwtape has already mentioned the Life Force in Letter 7 as a way to encourage a belief in devils but under a different name. In Perelandra, Lewis provides us with a character who serves this Life Force, Professor Weston, who describes it as “blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward in an endless unity of differentiated achievements.”98 Weston then cries out, “I call that Force into me completely,”99 it becomes clear that the Life Force is, indeed, merely a disguise for a diabolical force. Letter 23 begins with Screwtape’s admission that since the patient is getting to know more Christians every day, and intelligent Christians at that, it will

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be “quite impossible to remove spirituality from his life.”100 So the question becomes, as with the other positive elements in the patient’s life, how can Wormwood corrupt it? Screwtape says there has been a specific progression to his strategy. First they used the world to tempt the man, and failed. Then they turned to the temptations of the flesh, and failed again. Now Screwtape states that a third power remains, corrupted religion, and asserts this third kind of success to be “the most glorious of all,” for in Hell a spoiled saint is even better sport than a tyrant. Lewis is likely not suggesting this three-step pattern is the general sequence of temptation for everyone, and merely that it is for this patient. Screwtape’s tactic for twisting the patient’s spirituality will be to emphasize the social implications of the patient’s faith, yet another good element with potential to be used for evil. Screwtape’s plan to use social justice concerns in order to lead the man away from Christianity opens the door for a lengthy discussion of attempts by modern thinkers to distinguish a historical Jesus from the Jesus of the Gospels, a distinction Screwtape says should always be encouraged. He notes that there will be a different historical Jesus “every thirty years or so,”101 and since the current version emphasizes a Marxian, revolutionary leader, this becomes the connection with warping the patient’s concerns for social justice. In Letter 24, Screwtape briefly turns to the possibility of corrupting the girl’s spirituality by encouraging in her a feeling of superiority toward outsiders who do not share her beliefs. Screwtape has little hope that pride will be her downfall, but sees great potential for this seed to take root in the patient, a novice Christian. Wormwood is to make the patient feel that he and his new set of Christians are an exclusive group, better than the unbelievers around them, and even better than other believers. Screwtape tells Wormwood that the idea of belonging to an inner ring will be “very sweet” to the patient and that he should “play on that nerve.”102 Lewis himself encountered a malevolent inner circle while a student at Malvern College and then again later at Oxford, so it is not surprising that he addresses the temptations and abuses of belonging to an inner ring in a number of his works. In Surprised by Joy, he describes the negative effects of the all-consuming desire to be included in an exclusionary group. From this impulse, Lewis argues, “all sorts of meanness flow; the sycophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation of those whom it is well to know, the speedy abandonment of friendships that will not help on the upward path, the readiness to join the cry against the unpopular, the secret motive in almost every action.”103 When he was invited in 1944 to give the Commemoration Oration to students at King’s College in London, he delivered an address later published as “The Inner Ring,” in which he observed that the longing to be

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part of an inside group takes “many forms which are not easily recognizable as ambition,” and warns, “Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”104 Letters 25 to 27: “Christianity” and, Unselfishness versus Charity, and More on Prayer Screwtape opens Letter 25 complaining about the fact that the patient’s new friends are merely Christian, meaning that while they have their own unique interests, these personal interests are always subordinate to their Christianity. Lewis took the title of his book Mere Christianity, from the Puritan divine Richard Baxter (1615–1691), explaining there that he used this term to refer to beliefs that have been common to nearly all Christians at all times.105 In contrast to mere Christianity, Screwtape encourages Christianity and, Christian beliefs inexorably woven with the latest trend or fashion, a coloring stimulated by humans’ horror of “the same old thing.” Screwtape’s alternative to mere Christianity is mere preference, mere taste, and mere novelty. Here again in Screwtape we see a proper delight, specifically the natural pleasantness of change, twisted into a negative element, the demand for absolute novelty. This demand for novelty, by its very nature, fulfills Screwtape’s formula from Letter 9 of “an ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure.”106 In Letter 26, Lewis uses an implied comment made by Wormwood in the intervening correspondence to allow Screwtape to jump to the wholly different topic of unselfishness—how it contrasts with the virtue of charity, and how it may be used to create misunderstandings between the patient and his girl. Screwtape explains that while unselfishness for women means taking trouble for others, for men it means not giving trouble. Lewis through Screwtape suggests that in each trying to be unselfish, often a couple can often end up doing what neither person wants, leading to resentment, claims for preferential treatment in the future, and further disagreement. As Alan Jacobs has noted, Lewis would often develop an idea “one way in a science fiction novel, another way in a scholarly book, yet another way in a work of Christian apologetics, and in even a different way in one of the Narnia tales.”107 Jacobs argues these echoes are not mere repetitions but rather “a set of powerful insights or concerns being refracted through different facets of experience.”108 In “The Weight of Glory,” a sermon preached in the same year the Guardian letters appeared, Lewis opens with the very same contrast seen here in Screwtape: “If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if

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you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive.”109 Lewis’s point in both the sermon and in Screwtape is that the suppression of our natural desires, self-denial, has been raised to position it has not previously held. As Lewis makes clear in the sermon, while the New Testament often speaks about self-denial, it is never about self-denial as an end in itself. To reinforce his idea of how Wormwood must use unselfishness to his advantage, Screwtape provides an ironic comment from an unnamed human: “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression” (p. 145). Nineteen years after Screwtape in The Four Loves (1960), Lewis would further develop this idea of an “unselfish” mother whose “Gift-love” has been twisted: I am thinking of Mrs. Fidget, who died a few months ago. It is really astonishing how her family have brightened up. . . . There was always a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and always a hot meal at night (even in midsummer). They implored her not to provide this. They protested almost with tears in their eyes (and with truth) that they liked cold meals. It made no difference. She was living for her family.110

In the final paragraph of Letter 26, Screwtape notes that if people knew how much ill feeling this form of unselfishness generates, it would not be “so often recommended from the pulpit.”111 Letter 27 opens with Screwtape chiding Wormwood for not using the patient’s infatuation to distract him from the Enemy. Wormwood’s efforts have been counterproductive because the patient has made his distraction the very subject of his prayers, causing Screwtape to state, “Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.”112 Since the patient’s distraction has not proved useful, Wormwood is to try to corrupt the patient’s prayer by sowing doubt in his mind about praying in a way that is purely petitionary. The patient is to be led to believe that an offering of praise and communion is more spiritual than a request for daily bread, and in addition, to believe that requests that then come about would have happened anyway and those not granted are proof this type of prayer does not work. Lewis would return to this point in 1959 in an essay titled “The Efficacy of Prayer,” where he concludes: Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.113

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Lewis, through Screwtape, considers the problem of prayer and predestination—how is it possible that God knows what our prayers will be tomorrow but yet “leaves room” through our free will for us to decide whether to pray or not? Screwtape explains to Wormwood that this is no problem at all because “the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now.”114 Screwtape concludes that to watch someone do something is not the same as making him do it. Letters 28 to 30: The Uses of Middle Age, Danger, and Fatigue Around the time Lewis was writing Screwtape, he would have had vivid reminders of the German air raids on England, not only through the news, but also in the fact that children evacuated from London stayed at the Kilns and also through his own service as a member of The Home Guard, a duty that involved weekly late-night patrols on the outskirts of Oxford. In Letter 28, Screwtape complains about Wormwood’s glee about the heavy air raids on the patient’s town, but in one of book’s most startling reversals, Screwtape tells Wormwood that the patient’s death is “precisely what we want to avoid” since if he were to be killed he would “almost certainly be lost to us.”115 Screwtape then lists Wormwood’s defeats—which are, of course, victories from the patient’s perspective—and here we find the same three-stage progression outlined in Letter 23. First the patient escaped the entanglement of the worldly friends Wormwood provided. Then through his relationship with the Christian girl, he escaped the attacks on his chastity. Finally, as we learn here in Letter 28, the attempts to corrupt his spiritual life—the temptations to subordinate his faith to social justice and the attacks on his prayer life—have also failed. Wormwood’s patient, despite all the devils’ efforts, remains more in the Enemy’s camp than ever, and so his death at this point would be, for them, a disaster. Humans, thanks to the devils’ instruction, have come to think of death as the greatest evil and of survival as the greatest good, but Screwtape warns Wormwood that he should not be taken in by this propaganda. Due to Wormwood’s failures with his patient, failures at least partly due to the fact that “the Enemy has guarded him,” Screwtape’s negative tone is once again stepped up in this letter. Screwtape claims that although the recent battles for the patient’s soul have been lost, the war is not over; and in this, he claims, time is the devils’ ally. Why exactly Lewis is not more balanced here about the possibilities that a long life will hold for good as well as for evil is not clear. Perhaps this is one of the occasions where Screwtape is not telling the entire truth. Certainly, middle age can be filled with temptations, but unlike other moments in Screwtape

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there is no double-edged sword here to suggest that living longer can cut against as well as for the devils’ cause. Should the patient’s middle age be one of adversity, Screwtape claims that it will try his ability to “persevere.” If his middle age is prosperous, it will be easier to tempt him with worldly success. Lewis was in his early forties when he wrote Screwtape, so the question arises, “To what extent might he have been drawing from his own experience in describing middle age as a fruitful time for temptations?” Certainly he was tempted with the comfortable aspects of middle age. In a letter written to his friend Arthur Greeves in 1939, Lewis claims that one positive aspect of the outbreak of the war was that it helped to break the spell of self-satisfaction he had fallen under. “I was just beginning to get too well settled in my profession,” Lewis writes, “too successful, and probably self-complacent.”116 So it can be easily argued that Lewis—with the success of three recently published books, regular meetings of the Inklings, and status as one of Oxford’s most popular lecturers—fit Screwtape’s description of a man who was finding his place in the world. The senior devil observes: “His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want.”117 But what about the other side, which Screwtape claims middle age can have, the “routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes”?118 What about the “quiet despair” of overcoming the same chronic temptations again and again? What about the “drabness” that Screwtape associates here with middle age? What evidence is there that these elements could also have come from Lewis’s own life during this time? Later in life, Lewis would write a good deal on the trials and temptations of aging, but at this point in his life there is less to go on. We do have Lewis’s own admission in the 1961 preface that his own heart provided a reliable source for the temptations in Screwtape. In addition, there is evidence from an address he gave around the time of Screwtape titled “De Futilitate.” In this essay, Lewis declares it hard to believe that anyone could have reached “the middle forties” without having doubts that there was any good reason for the world to continue, without feeling the monotony and futility of human existence.119 And finally in the preface to The Problem of Pain, a work published the year before Screwtape’s debut, Lewis confesses to be unqualified to teach anything about “fortitude and patience,”120 a confession that suggests he himself struggled in these two areas at this time and that he himself was finding it hard to persevere. Screwtape’s musings on the good sense and maturity that the middle years supposedly produce allow him to bring Letter 28 to a conclusion by quoting “a great human philosopher” who, in speaking about virtue, claimed that

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“experience is the mother of illusion.”121 The quote comes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a book that Screwtape claims the Historical Point of View has rendered innocuous. The air raid bombings will surely keep the patient in peril, and Screwtape ponders what use can be made of this heightened, constant feeling of danger. Should Wormwood encourage cowardice, pride, hatred, fear, or despair in his patient? A bravery that results in pride would be a good choice, but Screwtape observes as he did with the pleasures, the virtues are something the devils are unable to produce on their own. Hatred, on the other hand, is easier for the devils to encourage, particularly since the noise, danger, and fatigue of the bombings make the humans prone to violent emotions. So all Wormwood need do is simply guide the patient’s natural susceptibility into the proper channel, but in Letter 30 readers learn that Wormwood has been unsuccessful in using the air raids to tempt the patient into any of the negative emotional conditions suggested by Screwtape. Although the young man was afraid, he did his duty and more. Wormwood has complained that his attacks on the patient have been beset with difficulties that should be taken into account along with his intentions and his lack of opportunities when determining the punishment for his lack of success. Screwtape chides his young charge for adopting the Enemy’s idea of justice, a stance that amounts to heresy since the justice of Hell looks only at results. Screwtape then warns Wormwood to bring back food, meaning the patient, otherwise he will become food himself. In the 1961 preface, Lewis thought it worthwhile to expand on this point. Bad angels, Lewis argues, are entirely practical, having only two motives: their fear of being punished and a type of perpetual hunger. Lewis explains further: I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s one. . . . In Hell, I feign that they recognize [this desire] as hunger. . . . There, I suggest, the stronger spirit— there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation—can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker’s outraged individuality.122

The air raids have left the patient exhausted and Screwtape urges that devilish use can be made of this, although he notes that fatigue can also lead to positive results—gentleness, quiet of mind, and even vision. The key will be to add unexpected demands on top of the patient’s fatigue; for, as Screwtape says in one his most insightful observations: “Whatever men expect they soon come to think they have a right to,”123 a continuation of the “My Time is My Own” policy seen earlier in Letter 21.

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Screwtape closes his last regular correspondence by revisiting a topic addressed near the close of his first letter: the need to confuse what is real and what is not. In all the positive experiences the patient has, Wormwood is to suggest that the physical elements are real and the spiritual ones are subjective. For those experiences that can “discourage or corrupt,” the opposite is to be encouraged. Thus blood and pain, the physical elements that accompany a birth, are what is real; the joy is not. In death, the terror and horror must be thought of as the main reality. Screwtape concludes with a second apt illustration of this policy: Any emotions produced by happy children or beautiful weather are to be dismissed as mere sentiment, while the patient’s emotions at the sight of human entrails are to be taken as a valid revelation of what is real. Letter 31: All Is Lost Screwtape begins his final letter with a string of elaborate pet names for Wormwood, terms of diabolical endearment signaling, not his affection, but his craving to consume the younger devil. Readers have speculated on the unique names which Lewis assigns to his seven devils—not just Screwtape and Wormwood, but also Glubose who is responsible for the patient’s mother; Slumtrimpet who is responsible for the young woman; Slubgob who heads up the tempter’s college; Toadpipe who serves as Screwtape’s scribe; and Triptweeze who has some relationship with the non-Christian acquaintances. In the 1961 preface, Lewis confesses to the fact that his devils’ names had excited a great amount of curiosity leading to “many explanations, all wrong.”124 His intention, Lewis explains, was merely to make them nasty by their sound and by the associations with that sound. Thus, Lewis speculates that Scrooge, screw, thumbscrew, tapeworm, and red tape all went into creating Screwtape’s name, and that slob, slobber, slubber (to perform in a slipshod manner), and gob played a role in Slubgob. Wormwood, besides having some negative sound associations, also is a word itself meaning something bitter. We learn the patient has died and is lost to the devils forever when Screwtape accuses Wormwood of having “let a soul slip through your fingers.”125 Lewis’s portrait of the moment of death is comforting and thrilling. One moment bombs are screaming and houses falling around the patient, the next moment all the horror is gone like a bad dream, left behind for good. His entrance into eternal life is all quite natural, “as if he’d been born for it.”126 Not only does the patient see Wormwood, but he also can finally see the angels who played key parts at vital times in the his life, spirits whom Wormwood can only cower before. In a phrase filled with beauty, Lewis states: “The dim consciousness of friends around him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience

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which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered.”127 The patient sees “Him,” a heavenly being described as one who “wears the form of a man,” Screwtape’s description of Christ, and the presence of this heavenly being is blinding, suffocating fire to Wormwood, but cool light and clarity to the patient. Screwtape implies there may be further purgation and pain for the patient, but it will be of a different nature than the pains of this life—and here Screwtape ends his discussion of the patient, claiming “Once more, the inexplicable meets us.”128 Screwtape concludes his final letter confessing that he is near despair. He takes comfort in that the fact that Wormwood, or a piece of him, will be given him as a dainty morsel to devour. CONCLUSION Lewis claimed that Screwtape was an unpleasant book to for him to write. After many requests for more correspondence from Screwtape, he finally wrote an additional piece called “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on December 19, 1959, and in later editions of the book. In the preface to the 1961 edition—the first to include this toast, which was more an address than an epistle—Lewis tells how for many years he felt no inclination to answer calls for another letter, declaring: “Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. . . . The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded.”129 According to Lewis, the work nearly smothered him to write it, but it remains a wonderfully uplifting book to read. As Mark DeForrest rightly points out, “Despite the impressive array of tactics used by the forces of darkness, Lewis’s book also bespeaks of the optimism of faith. . . . Despite the snares of Satan, the young man’s faith in Christ triumphs over the forces of evil and, in this triumph serves as an example of the ordinary Christian running an extraordinary race of faith.”130 Perhaps because it was the first of his books with a large, international success, Lewis always seemed ready to poke fun at the notoriety that The Screwtape Letters enjoyed. In the 1961 preface, he refers to it as “the sort of book that gets given to godchildren” or that “gravitates towards spare bedrooms, there to live a life of undisturbed tranquility in company with The Road Mender, John Inglesant, and The Life of the Bee.”131 Lewis also recounts the story of the hospital worker preparing for job interviews who chose Screwtape from a list of books to read because “it was the shortest.”132 Among the reviews that followed the release of Screwtape in 1942, were the comments of C. E. M. Joad, who claimed “Mr. Lewis possesses the rare gift of

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being able to make righteousness readable.”133 A Times Literary Supplement critic claimed, “A reviewer’s task is not to be a prophet, and time alone can show whether it is or is not an enduring piece of satirical writing.”134 With well over half a century gone since May 2, 1941, when the first of Screwtape’s letters appeared in The Guardian, time has indeed shown Lewis’s diabolical fiction to be truly enduring. NOTES 1. Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 161. 2. C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993), 355. 3. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 2003), 124. 4. C. S. Lewis, “The Dethronement of Power,” in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966), 90. 5. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 14. 6. Mark Edward Deforrest, “The Screwtape Letters,” in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 367. 7. Ibid. 8. Jocelyn Easton Gibb, Preface to “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” in The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 180. 9. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition (New York: Collier, 1961), v. 10. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), x. 11. Ibid., ix. 12. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition, vii. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., xii. 15. Ibid. 16. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 95. 17. Ibid., 96. 18. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1994), 129. 19. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, ix. 20. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 128. 21. Jacobs, The Narnian, 199. 22. Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2003), 342.

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23. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 342. 24. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 275. 25. A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Flamingo, 1991), 177. 26. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1. 27. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 191. 28. Ibid., 207. 29. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 150–151. 30. Ibid., 2. 31. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 141. 32. Ibid., 140. 33. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperTrophy, 1994), 48. 34. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 5. 35. Ibid. 36. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 5. 37. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 6. 38. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition, xiii. 39. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 37. 40. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, revised and enlarged (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 140. 41. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 8. 42. Marvin Hinten, “An Approach to Teaching The Screwtape Letters,” in The Lamp-Post, 28(3) (Fall 2004), 4. 43. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 79. 44. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 60–61. 45. Ibid., 13–14. 46. Lewis, “Miserable Offenders” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 124. 47. Warren Lewis, Brothers & Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 146. 48. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 14. 49. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1974), 234. 50. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, 1988), 46. 51. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 15. 52. Ibid., 16, 17. 53. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, 1992), 17. 54. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 16.

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55. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 17–18. 56. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 21. 57. Ibid., 24. 58. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 320. 59. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 25. 60. Ibid., 28. 61. Jonathan Swift, “Letter to Mr. Pope, September 29, 1725,” in Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Penguin), ix. 62. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 31. 63. Ibid., 32. 64. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition, viii. 65. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 34–35. 66. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 22. 67. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 408–409. 68. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 40. 69. Ibid., 45. 70. Ibid., 47. 71. Ibid., 49. 72. Ibid., 50. 73. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Revised and enlarged (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 131. 74. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 53. 75. Ibid., 58. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 60. 78. Ibid., 61. 79. Ibid., 63. 80. Ibid., 65. 81. Ibid., 67. 82. Ibid., 69. 83. Ibid., 71. 84. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 423. 85. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 76. 86. Ibid., 77. 87. Ibid., 83. 88. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 101. 89. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 88. 90. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 186. 91. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 94. 92. Ibid., 99, 100. 93. Ibid., 99. 94. Ibid., 105.

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95. Ibid., 118. 96. Ibid., 120. 97. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 26. 98. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003), 78. 99. Ibid., 82. 100. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 123. 101. Ibid., 124. 102. Ibid., 132. 103. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 108. 104. C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 151, 154. 105. Lewis, Mere Christianity, viii. 106. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 44. 107. Jacobs, The Narnian, 162. 108. Ibid. 109. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 25. 110. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1960), 48–49. 111. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 145. 112. Ibid., 147. 113. C. S. Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1987), 4–5. 114. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 150. 115. Ibid., 153, 154. 116. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 274. 117. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 155. 118. Ibid. 119. C. S. Lewis, “De Futilitate,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 57. 120. C. S. Lewis, preface to The Problem of Pain (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 10. 121. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 156. 122. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition, xi. 123. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 166. 124. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition, viii. 125. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 171. 126. Ibid., 172. 127. Ibid., 174. 128. Ibid., 175. 129. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition, xiii–xiv.

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130. Deforrest, “The Screwtape Letters,” in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, 368. 131. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition, vi. 132. Ibid. 133. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949, 276. 134. Ibid., 275–276.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carpenter, Humphrey, Editor. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1994, 129. Deforrest, Mark Edward. “The Screwtape Letters.” The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998, 367–368. Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2003, 342. Gibb, Jocelyn Easton. Preface to “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis. New York: HarperCollins, 2001, 180–182 Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1974, 234. Hinten, Marvin. “An Approach to Teaching The Screwtape Letters.” In The Lamp-Post, 28(3) (Fall 2004): 4–8. Hooper, Walter. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004, 274. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005, 161. Lewis, C. S. “De Futilitate,” Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995. ———. “The Dethronement of Power.” In On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966. ———. “The Efficacy of Prayer.” In The World’s Last Night and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1987. ———. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, 1988. ———. “The Inner Ring.” In The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. ———. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Revised Edition. Edited by Walter Hooper and Warren H, Lewis. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993. ———. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. New York: Harcourt, 1992. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: HarperTrophy, 1994. ———. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

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———. “Miserable Offenders.” In God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, ———. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. Perelandra. New York: Scribner, 2003. ———. A Preface to Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. ———. The Problem of Pain. New York: Touchstone, 1996. ———. The Screwtape Letters. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. ———. The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition. New York: Collier, 1961. ———. “The Weight of Glory,” The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Lewis, Warren. Brothers & Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988, 146. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994. Swift, Jonathan. “Letter to Mr. Pope, September 29, 1725.” In Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Penguin, 1975. Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. London: Flamingo, 1991.

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11

Columns of Light: The Preconversion Narrative Poetry of C. S. Lewis Don W. King

Although Lewis’s first published book was a collection of lyrical poems, Spirits in Bondage (1919), for the first thirty-five years of C. S. Lewis’s life he worked hard to write a great narrative poem. Many versions were attempted and later abandoned. Those that survive are notable primarily because they offer insight into two important matters: his desire to achieve literary acclaim as a great poet and his literary strivings before his conversion to Christianity. This essay will focus upon the two most important of these early narrative poems.1 The first, Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine, dated by Warren Lewis as having been written between summer 1912 and summer 1913, is a Valhalla poem based on summaries Lewis read in The Soundbox of Wagner’s The Ring of Nibelung.2 Its 794 lines of heroic couplets show unusual maturity. We know from Surprised by Joy that sometime early in 1911 after his move to Cherbourg House, Malvern, Lewis, one day musing in the library, came across the title of a new book listed in a literary periodical, Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. When he read the title he was suddenly transported into realms of pure “northernness,”3 and he attempted his version of The Rhinegold (the “prelude” of the Ring) without having read a line-by-line translation or heard a score.4 We also know Lewis was so enthralled by Wagner’s Ring of the

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Nibelung through his reading of synopses of that opera in The Soundbox that he immediately began work on Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine.5 Accordingly, Descend to Earth is an impressive accomplishment.6 Unlike Wagner’s opera, Lewis’s “Descend” is narrative rather than dramatic. Three complete books survive and a fragmentary fourth, suggesting that Lewis was structuring a work of twelve books imitating the Greek and Latin epics he so admired. Accordingly, we are not surprised when he begins with a six-line invocation to the Muses: Descend to earth, descend, celestial Nine And sing the ancient legend of the Rhine: What races first upon the world did dwell In earliest days, descend Oh Muse and tell. Who did the mighty hills inhabit, who The earth’s deep clefts: narrate the story true.7

Recalling Milton’s “Sing, Heavenly Muse” opening to Book I of Paradise Lost, Lewis follows by merging his love of classical narrative poetry in the next six lines with his new passion for Norse literature: Upon the mountain tops in happy light Abode the gods with majesty and might, Whom Wotan ruled as chief. The sluggish Rhine Rhine maidens sheltered, nymphs of form divine, Who for their sire a noted treasure held, The Rhinegold, and in watch of this they dwelled.8

It is not hard to imagine Lewis seeing himself in the tradition of great epic poets. Homer had his Odysseus, Virgil his Aeneas, Milton his Adam, Tennyson his Arthur, and Lewis his Wotan. Book I introduces Alberich, the misshapen king of the Niblung, who while rising one day from the river’s depth, sees the beautiful Rhine maidens swimming and is inflamed with lust. Once aware of him, the maidens mock and tease him: “‘Does Alberich indulge in dreams of love / And steer his mind through thoughts of his state above?’ /. . . They tantalize with dance the tiny king, / The waters wide with wanton laughter ring.”9 Alliteration, particularly effective here, is notable throughout the poem. While the opera then has the maidens one by one cruelly feign love for Alberich, effectively lacerating his emotions and humiliating him, in Lewis’s version they collectively taunt him, all the while inflaming his lust. Tiring of the Niblung king’s pursuits, Lewis’s maidens decide to give him a vision of the Rhinegold, hoping this will deflect

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interest away from them. This fatal error is compounded when they foolishly reveal the awful power of the gold: Knows he not the key By which alone the hoard his own may be? Knows he not as he tries to grasp in vain The treasure, that who would the Rhinegold gain Must first curse love before his hands may hold The glistening and so much desired gold. And he, should he but gain the pile he wants (If there be truth in legendary vaunts) If to a RING he forge it by the art Of goldsmith, then to rule shall be his part; Whoe’er the treasure keeps and wears the RING Shall rule the world, an everlasting king.10

Having seen Alberich’s lust, the maidens are confident he can never renounce love. However, the book ends with him seizing the gold, the maidens fleeing in disarray, and Alberich returning to the underworld in proud arrogance, this latter detail Lewis’s addition.11 In Book II the scene shifts to Asgard where Lewis summarizes Wotan’s agreement with the giants, Fasolt and Fafnir: if they build him a castle, he will give them his sister-in-law, Freia. Frika, Wotan’s wife, is incensed by the agreement and blames Logie, god of fire and Wotan’s favorite counselor, for advising him to accept the giants’ conditions.12 Before Wotan can respond, Fasolt and Fafnir appear, demanding payment. Wotan withdraws to retrieve Freia, in the mean time sending out Freia’s brothers, Froh, god of joy, and Donner, god of thunder, advising them to buy time while Wotan waits for Logie to appear. Using “oily words and counsels fair,” Freia’s brothers for a time have limited success, but Fasolt’s desire (his “blue eyes the fire flames fiercer still”) will not be thwarted. As the four of them prepare to fight, Wotan returns with Logie, demanding that he discover a way to void the agreement with the giants. Logie says that in his journeys he has learned of the story of the Rhine maidens and Alberich. Fafnir, fascinated by Logie’s story of the powerful gold, offers Wotan an unexpected deal: I had fondly hoped Freia to gain: But since you do not choose To give her up, I will not therefore lose My whole reward. Freia to thee I’ll give, (So may she always in Valhalla live). Give me that treasure which the god of fire Hath told us of: for that I most desire.13

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Wotan points out that the treasure is not his to give; after the giants lead Freia away, Logie urges Wotan to reconsider, reminding them that without Freia’s harvest of golden apples, the gods of Walhalla will grow weak and lose power. The book ends with Wotan reluctantly agreeing to take on the quest and to descend to the Nibelheim. Book III descends to the Nibelheim where we find Alberich lording his new power over his goldsmith Mime, who he has commissioned to forge a magic helmet. Mime, while cognizant the gold has power, does not know what the power is, so he is physically abused by Alberich for not having the helmet ready when he demands it. The helmet’s power is substantial: “For the Tarnhelm—so the cap was named / This virtue for the golden helmet claim; / Whoe’er the headgear wore, at any time / What form he wished could take.”14 When Alberich puts it on for the first time, he becomes invisible and rewards Mime for his hard work by beating him senseless. Into this dark, noxious atmosphere, Wotan and Logie suddenly appear. Pretending to care about Mime’s mistreatment by Alberich, Logie offers to conspire with Mime against his cruel king. Before they can come to an agreement, Alberich appears, pitilessly driving a crew of Niblungs before him with a whip and holding a ring of gold above his head. Logie tries to flatter Alberich, but he sees through Logie and bitterly scorns Asgard: Do gods Descend the dark and unfrequented roads That lead to my dark realm, respects to pay To Alberich? Or leave the glowing day To seek the caverns of a king they hate? Or doth the eagle with the beetle mate? Am I a child that I should thus believe Ye come love-laden spirits to relieve With kindly words? Nay: never was there yet A god but did all misery beget With lofty schemes. The price of Asgard’s good Is running rivulets of human blood.15

These lines, perhaps the best poetry in the poem, reveal Lewis writing almost effortlessly, using effective imagery, unforced rhymes, and pointed rhetoric. Though Alberich scorns Wotan and Logie, he cannot resist demonstrating his newly acquired power, so he threatens to use his ring and helmet against them. Fate, he says, has permitted Asgard to rule until the present, but now “fate hath prepared its downfall and its shame: / The ring hath made me monarch of ye all.”16 Wotan, his pride offended, is enraged at this threat;

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before Wotan lashes out, however, Logie intervenes and cleverly demands Alberich give a demonstration of his power; unless they see him change shape, they will not believe his words. Initially, Alberich rejects this demand, wisely seeing through Logie’s scheme: “And think ye, friends, / I do not know your avaricious ends: / Shall I a small and feeble beast become, / That you may bear the treasure from my home?”17 Logie, undeterred, presses Alberich, shaming his pride so that he forgets his own warning; Alberich transforms himself into a vicious fox.18 Wotan is horrified when he witnesses this, but Logie seizes the chance to appeal to Alberich’s vanity. Feigning awe, Logie flatters Alberich and asks for another demonstration. Alberich, his reason blind to the danger, foolishly does exactly what he said he would not: “And where the dwarf in form of fox had been / There writhed a slimy toad upon the floor.”19 At this Wotan rushes forward, pinning Alberich to the floor, and Logie seizes the helmet. The book concludes as the gods embrace, grab the toad, and ascend from Nibelheim. Book IV is a fragment of forty-three lines and departs radically from Wagner. It begins with Wotan and Logie bringing the toad to Walhalla, while Valkryies, Brunhilda in particular, are seen riding in the distance. As Wotan is about to speak to Fricka, the manuscript breaks off. Lewis himself says the work breaks down here because he begins “to try to convey some of the intense excitement I was feeling, to look for expressions which would not merely state but suggest. Of course I failed, lost my prosaic clarity, spluttered, gasped, and presently fell silent.”20 That Lewis never returned to the poem, although he does deal with related characters and issues in Loki Bound several years later, is our loss, for he achieves much, especially in the three complete books. For example, we see him handling rather effectively the demands of narrative poetry, combining an effective meter and rhyme with a compelling story. Furthermore, his characterization suggests insights to human nature we might not expect from one so young and far exceed Wagner’s flat, almost melodramatic characters. While Lewis can be criticized for lacking his own creative impulse and thus writing a derivative narrative, within the limits of the genre and his age, Descend to Earth is unusually powerful, containing sustained passages of very good poetry; in addition, in this poem we see him working through ideas and themes that later surface in works as dissimilar as Dymer and Till We Have Faces. Lewis’s second important narrative poem is Dymer, his primary verse preoccupation from 1920 to 1926.21 In his introduction to the 1950 edition of Dymer, Lewis summarizes what the poem means to him: My hero was to be a man escaping from illusion. He begins by egregiously supposing the universe to be his friend and seems for a time to find confirmation of his belief.

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Then he tries, as we all try, to repeat his moment of youthful rapture. It cannot be done; the old Matriarch sees to that. On top of his rebuff comes the discovery of the consequences which his rebellion against the City has produced. He sinks into despair and gives utterance to the pessimism which had, on the whole, been my own view about six years earlier [note this would mean anytime between 1917–1919, corresponding with Lewis’s battlefield experiences]. Hunger and a shock of real danger bring him to his senses and he at last accepts reality. But just as he is setting out on the new and soberer life, the shabbiest of all bribes is offered him; the false promise that by magic or invited illusion there may be a short cut back to the one happiness he remembers. He relapses and swallows the bait, but he has grown too mature to be really deceived. He finds that the wish-fulfillment dream leads to the fear-fulfillment dream, recovers himself, defies the Magician who tempted him, and faces his destiny.22

However, an author’s reading of his own poem is always suspect since rarely can he know all that goes into it; even less under his control is all that comes out of the poem as the text is engaged by various readers. Accordingly, I believe a better approach to Dymer is one informed by viewing Dymer as a haughty adolescent intent on living an autonomous life. As he faces the consequences of his selfish, cruel actions, however, he achieves humility and wisdom albeit at high personal cost. Moreover, in Dymer we hear a voice stripped of religious dogma, utterly unbound by conventional, orthodox Christianity. In addition, the impact of Lewis’s World War I experiences and the influences of Norse mythology and literature are intrinsic to a fuller understanding of the poem.23 The first hint that Lewis’s love of Norse literature is at work in Dymer is found opposite the title page in the first edition published by Dent in 1926. There we find this epigram from Havamal, Odin’s High Song from The Poetic Edda, essentially a code of laws and ethics his people are to use to govern their conduct: “Nine nights I hung upon the Tree, wounded with the spear as an offering to Odin, myself sacrificed to myself.”24 This epigram offers a key to understanding Dymer’s cryptic conclusion. The first of nine cantos introduces us to Dymer, a nineteen-year-old student, living in a repressed, constrained, and totalitarian state.25 Stimulated by Nature’s fecundity, he rebels against his situation, murders his teacher in class, and escapes to Nature. There, he strips off his clothes and wanders about in a mad desire for desire. In a forest clearing he discovers and enters a castle. Dymer’s emotional upheaval in this stanza is stimulated no doubt in part because he has been repressed for nineteen years, but also it is awakened by the longing for beauty that nature inspires in him. For instance, the narrator appears to excuse Dymer’s inattention in a rigid classroom one April morning since “who ever learned to censor the spring day?”26 Challenged by his teacher, Dymer murders him, echoing the actions of Siegfried against his teacher and

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foster parent, Mime, from Wagner’s Siegfried.27 Dymer turns to nature as a first resort; seeking to divorce himself from his previous life, he strips naked and wanders about a forest, crushing “wet, cool flowers against his face: / And once he cried aloud, ‘O world, O day, / Let, let me,’—and then found no prayer to say” (p. 111). Dymer, is quickly overcome, like Shakespeare’s Caliban, by powerfully evocative music coming from an unidentified source, and for the remainder of Canto I he follows “the music, unendurable / In stealing sweetness wind from tree to tree” until it leads him to a light coming through an arch in a forest glen (p. 112). In Canto II Dymer boldly moves through the arch; inside he finds great beauty enclosed by a high dome, further exciting his desire. However, when he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, Narcissus-like, he becomes fascinated with his own physical beauty. Finding lavish clothing hanging near the mirror, he vainly dresses himself and “wondered that he had not known before / How fair a man he was” (p. 113). Dymer, in full flight from the totalitarian state that bred him, embraces total self-indulgence, even planning to return to the city as a self-proclaimed hero. Believing himself an autonomous man, Dymer thinks he can be the savior of the ignorant, deluded beings he left in the city. As the narrative continues his cocky manchild soon comes upon a rich banquet that attracts his palate: “When Dymer saw this sight, he leaped for mirth, / He clapped his hands, his eye lit like a lover’s. / He had a hunger in him that was worth / Ten cities” (p. 113). The language of this passage is revealing. While on the one hand it literally refers to Dymer’s physical hunger, so long unsated in the forest, on the other hand, it figuratively refers to his unrealized sexual desires. Accordingly, the eating binge at the table that follows foreshadows his sexual encounter at the end of the canto. Rejecting his past, he intends instead to push forward to unrestrained desire. Dymer next sees a low door hidden by “dark curtains, sweepy fold, nightpurple pall,” and is mysteriously attracted to it: “Sudden desire for darkness overbore / His will, and drew him towards it. All was blind / Within. He passed. The curtains closed behind” (p. 114).28 Within the place is richly evocative with a cool smell “that was holy and unholy,” and a soft thicket of “broad leaves and wiry stems.” Sensuous and sensual, this lush, dark place causes Dymer’s body to thirst for sensual fulfillment: “With body intent he felt the foliage quiver / On breast and thighs. With groping arms he made / Wide passes in the air” (p. 115). In addition, as he senses consummation coming to his long burning desire, “a sacred shiver / Of joy from the heart’s centre oddly strayed / To every nerve.” Groping forward with excitement and fear, he finds “a knee-depth of warm pillows on the ground.” He sinks down into the luxurious bedding feeling it a “sweet rapture to lie” there. Then,

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unexpectedly, out of the silent darkness “as if by stealth” a hand touches his and he hears “a low grave laugh and rounded like a pearl / Mysterious, filled with home” (p. 115). Dymer, now in a fever pitch of longing, does not wait to respond: He opened wide His arms. The breathing body of a girl Slid into them. From the world’s end, with the stride Of seven-leagued boots came passion to his side. Then, meeting mouths, soft-falling hair, a cry, Heart-shaken flank, sudden cool-folded thigh. (p. 115)

The canto ends with one of the best passages of poetry in the entire poem: The same night swelled the mushroom in earth’s lap And silvered the wet fields: it drew the bud From hiding and led on the rhythmic sap And sent the young wolves thirsting after blood, And, wheeling the big seas, made ebb and flood Along the shores of earth: and held these two In dead sleep till the time of morning dew. (p. 115)

These passages can easily be seen as autoerotic since initially the hand that touches him as well as the source of the laugh is not identified; even after the girl is introduced we do not know if she is the source of the initial touch and laugh. Regardless, in this creature Dymer realizes his inarticulate longing for desire as sexual passion, unimpeded, and all consuming. His heretofore unfocused longing finds outlet in this mysterious girl. The canto, therefore, begins with Dymer initially attracted by idealized beauty and moves him to the end where he experiences the intensity of raw sexual passion. Canto III marks the peak of Dymer’s emotional high in the poem, but it also begins his descent into despair. It starts the morning after his spent passion with the unidentified girl. Dymer awakens to a sanguine morning of still, lovely beauty, conscious of a warm, breathing body next to him. Curiously, however, he never looks at the girl; instead he arises to go out and to enjoy the forest beauty alone. He lingers here leisurely stretching, yawning, sighing, and laughing softly to himself, apparently completely satisfied. As an adolescent, he does not understand that the joy he revels in is cheaply purchased, unable to sustain him. This knowledge, however, is not long in coming, for as he suddenly remembers the girl, he longs to return to her. He sentimentalizes his affection for her when he reflects the forest would be a frightful place, “but

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now I have met my friend / Who loves me, [and] we can talk to the road’s end” (p. 117). He returns to the low door, but is unsure whether it is the same one he entered the night before. At the same moment, he realizes he does not even know the girl’s name, so he hastens to find her. The path to his bower of bliss is blocked, however; Lewis describes a creature the opposite of what Dymer imagines he enjoyed the previous evening: And it had hands, pale hands of wrinkled flesh, Puckered and gnarled with vast antiquity, That moved. He eyed the sprawling thing afresh, And bit by bit (so faces come to be In the red coal) yet surely, he could see That the swathed hugeness was uncleanly human, A living thing, the likeness of a woman. (p. 117)

In addition, she is mantled in thick cloth that draped to the ground, giving the impression she is rooted to the earth. Ominously, her face is not visible. Dymer shrinks from her, turns, and runs to another entrance. To his horror, he finds the same enigmatic creature blocking his path; when he goes to other doors, she is always waiting. Sick with despair and anticipation, he calls out to his unidentified lover, again sentimentalizing their relationship. He tries yet another door, but the hag is there as well; he turns to swagger and bravado: “Out of my path, old woman. For this cause / I am new born, new freed, and here new wed, / That I might be the breaker of bad laws.” He claims she will “not wrest / My love from me. I journey on a quest / You cannot understand, whose strength shall bear me / Through fire and earth. A bogy will not scare me” (p. 118). Nevertheless, the assertion his lawlessness is stronger than old rules and his pompous, vain claims of autonomy are ineffectual. Seeing the hag intractable, he falters; his last desperate plea is for pity and shows him willing to recant and confess his sin if only she will let him pass. Still she remains silent. Driven wild by desire, Dymer attempts to force his way by the old hag, but is knocked senseless for his efforts. The canto ends with an image recalling the eviction of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden; Dymer is seen coming away from the entrance “slowly, drunkenly reeling, / Blind, beaten, broken, past desire of healing, / Past knowledge of his misery, he goes on / Under the first dark trees and now is gone” (p. 119). Who is this old woman?29 She has strong connections to Erda of Wagner’s Siegfried and the Norns of Norse literature. Erda, ancient prophetess of the underworld, is sought out by Wotan in the third act of the play when he

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comes and asks her how he can conquer his fear of the future, particularly his knowledge that the twilight of the gods is certain. While Erda does speak to him, unlike the old hag who remains silent, her words are evasive and without comfort. Interestingly, however, she defends Brunnhilde from Wotan’s anger and attempts to reconcile him to her. The Norns, the three Northern goddesses of fate, are not subject to the other gods, and their main tasks are “to warn the gods of future evil, to bid them make good use of the present, and to teach them wholesome lessons from the past.”30 Daily they weave the web of fate, albeit it blindly and not according to their own wishes; instead they are subject to Orlog, the eternal law of the universe. Urd (wurd or weird), later portrayed by Wagner as Erda, is the Norn with the most affinities to Lewis’s old hag. As a personification of time, she appears “very old and decrepit, continually looking backward, as if absorbed in contemplating past events and people.”31 If Lewis based his old hag upon Urd, her silence indicates Dymer’s spent passion is just that: spent, finished, over, with no hope of repeating itself in spite of his eagerness to consummate it again. He can no longer hope to return to the past, either to his unidentified lover or to the totalitarian state; he is alone, without comfort, finally realizing in full the awful loneliness of attempting to live as an autonomous man. The old hag, therefore, is the first concrete evidence in his experience giving the lie to Dymer’s quest for autonomy. Cantos IV and V function together, first portraying Dymer’s descent into morose emotional despair; and then, after he realizes his nadir, his mood lightens as Canto V ends. Canto IV begins with Dymer, who is now devastated and wandering about the forest, suffering the deluge of a fierce rainstorm, symbolic of the terrible tempest in his mind.32 Dymer longs for the storm to punish him for his folly. Eventually the storm lessens but not Dymer’s morose despair; in fact, “then came the worst hour for flesh and blood” (p. 120). Dymer is in his worst hour because he now knows he is totally alone, and his dream of autonomy carries the bitter price of isolation, estrangement, and alienation. He no longer hopes to find the fulfillment of his dreams in an inarticulate longing, since the everyday, humdrum world is all about him. Even yet he has not experienced the worst, for at the moment he thinks he is most alone in his misery, he hears someone nearby breathe out in pain. He discovers a horribly wounded soldier. When Dymer beckons him to reach out his hands for help, the soldier curses him and says: “They’ve done for me. / I’ve no hands. Don’t come near me. No, but stay, / Don’t leave me . . . O my God! Is it near day?” (p. 121).33 Dymer, stunned by this man’s condition, has yet not reached the depth of his own despair, for as the wounded soldier tells his story, Dymer learns the ironic truth: he is responsible for not only this man’s injuries but for the slaughter of many. The wounded soldier recounts how the

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story of Dymer’s rebellion and longing for personal fulfillment had infected many, spreading like disease through the society: As many of the young in the society joined the rebellion, exulting in their own newly discovered autonomy, the leaders of the totalitarian state cracked down. Still, led on by a charismatic leader, Bran, the rebellion proceeded, ostensibly inspired by Dymer. In describing the fighting, Lewis draws upon his own World War I battlefield memories. As the rebels press forward amid “charge and cheer and bubbling sobs of death, / We hovered on their front. Like swarming bees / Their spraying bullets came—no time for breath” (p. 122). Instead of men, they become brutes: “I saw men’s stomachs fall out on their knees; / And shouting faces, while they shouted, freeze / Into black, bony masks. Before we knew / We’re into them . . . “Swine!”—“Die, then!”—“That’s for you!” The wounded soldier recalls seeing “an old . . . man / Lying before my feet with shattered skull” while Bran moves to commit atrocities against prisoners; he wants “to burn them, wedge their nails up, crucify them” (p. 122). When this unbridled revenge occurs, the “noble rebellion” becomes simply a blood bath. As the rebels win victory after victory, they torch the city and become ever more bloodthirsty: “We had them in our power! / Then was the time to mock them and to strike, / To flay men and spit women on the pike, / Bidding them to dance.” To Dymer’s horror, he hears the wounded soldier say “wherever the most shame / Was done the doer called on Dymer’s name” (p. 122). After the rebels claim bloody victory, however, Bran’s paranoia causes him to solidify his power by making an example of a few in order to intimidate all the rest. So it is, says the soldier, he is randomly selected and “they cut away my two hands and my feet / And laughed and left me for the birds to eat.” He dies cursing Dymer, who “sat like one that neither hears nor sees. / And the cold East whitened beyond the trees” (p. 122). Canto V begins with Dymer having wandered aimlessly away from the corpse until he comes to a deep valley; when he gazes down into the valley, he experiences deep despair. Overcome by weariness, he falls asleep. But this is no peaceful sleep; rather, he has a nightmare filled with battlefield horror. When he awakens, he indulges in self-pity, regretting his loss of fulfilled longing with the unknown girl and his actions that have caused the slaughter of so many. Tormented by the thought of the latter, he tries to comfort himself with sentimental thoughts of his beloved. Unfortunately, he has no solid memory of her to comfort him, and so is left pathetically alone. Still, Dymer has much to learn, for instead of admitting his own responsibility in both disasters, he blames a cruel, malicious God. He blames this God for his joy denied, and attempts to move back into his position as an autonomous man. He rejects the dead soldier’s implication that he is responsible for the rebellion, claiming he acted only for himself. Though he thinks about killing himself, instead he falls

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to the ground, reverting to a fetal position: “he crouched and clasped his hands about his knees / And hugged his own limbs for the pitiful sense / Of homeliness they had” (p. 124). Except for the impulsive murder of his teacher and his almost accidental liaison with the unknown girl, Dymer is no man of action. Moreover, once his desire is spent, he wanders purposelessly. As a matter of fact, the rest of the canto describes his descent into the deep valley, gradual at first, but then, when he slips on a steep slope, he clutches desperately to the hillside. In this moment of crisis, he finds impetus to go on, hugging the earth to himself, feeling “it was the big, round world beneath his breast, / The mother planet” who saved him at the moment of his greatest need. Humility finally follows: “The shame of glad surrender stood confessed, / He cared not for his boasts. This, this was best, / This giving up of all. He need not strive; / He panted, he lay still, he was alive” (p. 124). After this and for the first time since he murdered his teacher, Dymer sleeps a deep, restful slumber, marked only by a comforting dream where he hears a lark sing the promise of the world never ending. After this dream, Dymer awakens cleansed, reconciled with himself, and prepared to face the consequences of his previous actions. Moreover, he no longer seeks to live autonomously. Cantos I–V take Dymer through emotional extremes beginning with haughty spiritual and personal pride, moving through profound depression and despair, then finishing with calm acceptance. Reminiscent of the emotional roller coaster Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner endured, Dymer’s story might best be finished at the conclusion of Canto V. However, Dymer has more to learn about himself and the consequence of his rebellious, self-willed actions earlier in the poem. Cantos VI and VII illustrate through the appearance of a great Magician that Dymer is not yet free from destructive dreams. Indeed, in this Magician Dymer sees the frightening image of what he will become if he continues such dreams. In brief, Canto VI finds Dymer following the song of the lark in a search for food. His peaceful search has a shadow fall across it when he hears in the distance a gun fired, and a short time later he comes to the house of a Magician. This Magician “was a mighty man whose beardless face / Beneath gray hair shone out so large and mild / It made a sort of moonlight in the place. / A dreamy desperation, wistful-wild, / Showed in his glance and gait.”34 Furthermore, “over him there hung the witching air” (p. 126). In this Magician Dymer encounters the image of what he can become: an autonomous man completely divorced from the concerns of the world and other human beings, selfishly indulging his egoistic appetites. The Magician lives only for himself and the constant pursuit of realizing in full the dreams he seeks.

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In his first words to Dymer, the Magician reveals the extent of his self-focus. He asks how Dymer discovered him, wondering if he heard the gunshot. Dymer is horrified when the Magician casually explains he had killed the lark. The Magician’s action is capricious and selfish; he excuses the shooting by saying the lark sang too long and disturbs his dreams in sleep. His self-focus is further exposed when he takes Dymer to his garden and explains his plantings are intended to enclosed the house from the outside world. Interestingly, he confesses that nothing he plants in the garden grows; this detail suggests that his attempt to live an autonomous life is sterile. One who lives only for himself and his dreams in the end atrophies and withers. Dymer, even though offended by the execution of the lark, never passes moral judgment upon the Magician. He accepts the invitation to eat supper there. He also listens to the Magician’s tales of magic words until he begins to nod off. So powerful are the Magician’s words that Dymer forgets his earlier resolution to forswear his dreams, quickly telling the Magician about this girl he loved but never saw. As he listens, the Magician, perhaps to lure Dymer ever deeper into his dreams, claims the girl of his dreams is not imaginary but heavenly. When Dymer tries to discuss Bran and the rebellion, the Magician loses interest. Why? Because Bran and the rebellion have to do with the real world, not the realm of dreams. For the Magician and his desire to live an autonomous life, the real world has little interest. Lewis’s Magician falls prey to his own art and rejects human fellowship. Isolation is the substance of his enclosed, restricted life. Consequently, he offers Dymer the chance to learn the technique of living constantly in dreams. Based on his most recent experiences, however, Dymer initially resists the Magician’s suggestion. Dymer wants to live in the world with other human beings, not autonomously in a world of dreams. In fact, Dymer exposes a flaw in the Magician’s thinking because he claims his beloved was not a dream; she was a real woman in the forest grot. Still, the Magician presses his point and makes powerful arguments, even ascribing to dreams biblical merit: “There the stain / Of oldest sins—how do the good words go?— / Though they were scarlet, shall be white as snow” (p. 127).35 The Magician’s philosophy, that morality is narrow and limiting, recalls Dymer’s youthful pride and rebellion. Furthermore, when Dymer, still struggling against the Magician’s rhetoric, insists he must undo his sins and repent, the Magician scorns such resolutions: “Throw down your human pity; cast your awe / Behind you; put repentance all away” (p. 127). The amorality of the Magician is transparent to Dymer, who claims he would happily serve as a slave on earth for anyone, if, at the end of the year, he could see his beloved’s face just for a moment and hear her urge him to live with courage

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for another year. Such virtues the Magician mocks, for they are false promises of future reward that restrain autonomous living. The canto ends conspiratorially, as the Magician finally reveals he is not human; as a consequence, when the Magician offers Dymer a drink from his cup that will take him to the valley of dreams, he is tempted. Moreover, the Magician’s final argument convinces Dymer to succumb: “Earth is a sinking ship, a house whose wall / Is tottering while you sweep; the roof will fall / Before the work is done. You cannot mend it. / Patch as you will, at last the rot must end it” (p. 128). Although he does so reluctantly, even admitting suspicions, Dymer decides to accept the Magician’s claim that dreams can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. In Canto VII the Magician joins Dymer in drinking. While Dymer’s dreams are somewhat unsettling, the Magician’s dreams are fantastic, and he teeters on the edge of madness. In passages anticipating Weston’s demonic possession in Perelandra and the mad, chaotic, dissolution of Belbury at the conclusion of That Hideous Strength, Lewis describes the Magician’s descent into a personal hell. As the drug from the cup begins to take affect, the Magician staggers about, eyes bulging, catching sight, apparently of his personal hell The Magician’s reliance on the occult to bolster his dream of autonomy finally catches up to him, and in the middle of the Magician’s nightmarish dream sequence, Dymer, groggy with the drug and unaware of his master’s descent into madness, affirms the dream world of the Magician is a lie. Accordingly, when his own dream shows him his beloved, he knows she is “the mirror of my heart, / Such things as boyhood feigns beneath the smart / Of solitude and spring. I was deceived / Almost. In that first moment I believed” (p. 129). He describes how her beauty momentarily caused him to listen to her invitation to live forever in the dream world. Like the femme fatale of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” she has a powerful affect upon him: She told me I had journeyed home at last Into the golden age and the good countrie That had been always there. She bade me cast My cares behind forever:—on her knee Worshipped me, lord and love—oh, I can see Her red lips even now! Is it not wrong That men’s delusions should be made so strong? (p. 129)

The adolescent Dymer could never have reasoned thus, clearly indicating his maturation in the poem. Indeed, in spite of his being “besotted” with this dream of his beloved, he manages to see through the scheme: “She went too

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fast. Soft to my arms she came. / The robe slipped from her shoulder. The smooth breast / Was bare against my own.” The eroticism of this passage, much more explicit than anything we saw earlier in the autoerotic sequence at the end of Canto II, ironically does not serve to stimulate Dymer. In point of fact, he sees his dream of her is simply love of self: “She shone like flame / Before me in the dusk, all love, all shame— / Faugh!—and it was myself” (p. 129). Dymer realizes the great deception in attempting to live an autonomous life is that he is in love with himself; he finally comes to see himself as a self-indulgent narcissist. This realization, however, is followed by a fierce temptation to return to autoeroticism. An unbridled orgy of sexual temptation and revelry is then described, a passage George Sayer calls “perhaps one of the most powerful in the whole range of English poetry.”36 Like the brown girls of The Pilgrim’s Regress, various figures accost Dymer, singing “we are the lust / That was before the world and still shall be /. . . We are the mother swamp, the primal sea /. . . Old, old are we. / It is but a return . . . it’s nothing new, / Easy as slipping on a well-worn shoe” (p. 130). The most offensive of these is a parody of his dream beloved, who baldly offers: “I am not beautiful as she, / But I’m the older love; you shall love me / Far more than Beauty’s self. You have been ours / Always. We are the world’s most ancient powers” (p. 130). Although we cannot be sure, Lewis intimates Dymer resists these autoerotic temptations since he scorns the Magician, and turns to leave. However, the Magician, hopelessly mad in the deception of his own dreams, pulls out his gun; as with the lark who disturbed his dreams and had to be eliminated, so with Dymer. Besides, he cannot afford to have someone leave his autonomous world since he may become an agent to help pull it down. Dymer tries to avoid the shot, but he is wounded and swoons as the canto ends. In Cantos VI and VII Lewis strips Dymer to yet another layer of understanding; that is, any who attempt to live autonomously, be it literally or via dreams, are certain to be frustrated. Dymer finds himself now unable to rely upon either his physical or imaginative faculties. He is now ready to learn his final lesson and in the process become greater than he might have ever imagined; he has to be humbled before he can be exalted. Cantos VIII and IX portray the redemption of Dymer (recalling that Lewis titled an early version of this story The Redemption of Ask). Canto VIII portrays Dymer coming to a full knowledge of himself and his failings, while undergoing a final stripping away of the layers of self-will. Canto IX illustrates how such knowledge equips him for a final denial of self, something he is incapable of in his youthful pride and rebellion. In short, the autonomous man rejects self and dies a sacrificial death for others. Canto VIII opens when Dymer regains consciousness; he has managed to drag himself away from

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the Magician’s house and garden, lying by a country lane. Immediately he feels the sharp, terrible pain in his side from the Magician’s gunshot, perhaps a battlefield detail and certainly one Lewis knew firsthand via his shrapnel wound. Initially he feels the cold air and earth about him and believes he is alone. Turning on his side, however, he sees a woman standing nearby, “and while he looked the knowledge grew / She was not of the old life but the new” (p. 131). What follows is a fascinating dialogue between them, and whether Dymer dreams it, has a vision, or actually experiences it is less important than what he learns about himself. By the ends of their conversation he is a “new” man. In answer to many questions, she tells Dymer she is “the loved one, the long lost.” To his complaint that she should never have permitted him to suffer the pangs of longing and the mental agony of not having her, she shocks him by saying he should have asked her name, in effect telling him he was deceived from the very beginning about who she was. Bitterly, though still not sure who she is, he tells her to leave him since she neither loves him nor understands human tears and pain. Again she stuns him when she says she actually know them all. She then goes on to reveal she is one of the gods, “the eternal forms,” who lives “in realms beyond the reach of cloud, and skies / Nearest the ends of air . . . / [Who has] looked into their eyes / Peaceful and filled with pain beyond surmise” (p. 131). She understands human pain, she implies, because she has watched humans love the beauty of the world rather than the beauty behind the world—the “real beauty” that serves to infuse the beauty men see on earth. Scales fall off Dymer’s eyes as he realizes his early love for nature was misdirected; in effect he loved the creature rather than the creator. Yet Dymer still questions her. Why, he asks, do the gods lure spirits like himself, “the weak, the passionate, and the fool of dreams,” when stronger men who “never pine / with whisperings at the heart, soul-sickening gleams / Of infinite desire, and joy that seems / The promise of full power” are left alone? Why, he presses, has he suffered for mistaking earthly beauty for real beauty? How can this have been sin? Do the gods have no voice to direct men? Must creatures of dust “guess their own way in the dark?” Tersely, she replies, “They must.” Dymer’s anger grows as he recounts how she came to him in “sweet disguise / Wooing me, lurking for me in my path, / Hid your eternal cold with woman’s eyes, / Snared me with shows of love—and all was lies.” Her surprising response is “our kind must come to all / If bidden, but in the shape for which they call,” and she goes on to add the gods are not at fault if humans shape and mold eternal beauty into earthly forms (p. 131). Her implication is transparent: we fashion our idols according to our own desires. Dymer is momentarily appeased as he considers this and realizes his error.

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However, his anger flares when he cries out that had he loved a beast it would have at least responded warmly. Is there no comfort, no human love left for him? She warns him against asking such questions and instead tells him he is learning the great truth that life is a process of learning how to die. His own process begins now as he sees the death of his dream of beauty: “Your eyes / First see her dead: and more, the more she dies” (p. 132). More importantly, she finishes her conversation by pointing Dymer toward the truth he must eventually know for himself: You are still dreaming, dreams you shall forget When you have cast your fetters, far from here. Go forth; the journey is not ended yet. You have seen Dymer dead and on the bier More often than you dream and dropped no tear, You have slain him every hour. Think not at all Of death lest into death by thought you fall. (p. 132)

Dymer learns his has been a life of dreams, and that he is to go on from this point, even though terribly wounded, to live. His story is not over, as he has himself to blame for his wounds. He has been his own worst enemy. His death wish, she warns, will be self-fulfilling. After she vanishes, Dymer thinks deeply about her words, leading to the first obvious signs of his renewal: “Link by link the chain / That bound him to the flesh was loosening fast / And the new life breathed in unmoved and vast” (p. 132). He remembers the wounded soldier, identifying with him and wondering if he had the same realizations Dymer is just now having; he even blesses him for having revealed the truth of Dymer’s deceived nature then. In doing so, Dymer finally rejects his selfish life and the desire to live as an autonomous being: How long have I been moved at heart in vain About this Dymer, thinking this was I . . . Why did I follow close his joy and pain More than another man’s? For he will die, The little cloud will vanish and the sky Reign as before. The stars remain and earth And Man, as in the years before my birth. (pp. 132–133)

This passage is very significant since we see Dymer for the first time thinking of others rather than himself. In addition, this self-abnegation is followed by the very mature reflection that the universe is not all about Dymer. Indeed, his

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passing will have little impact upon the great scheme of things. This moment of self-knowledge is the climax of the poem, for now Dymer can move out of himself and his selfish egoism to engage fully in the lives of others. He can turn away from his conceited introspections, autoerotic compulsions, and autonomous yearnings to a new life yet to be discovered: There was a Dymer once who worked and played About the City; I sloughed him off and ran. There was a Dymer in the forest glade Ranting alone, skulking the fates of man. I cast him also, and a third began And he too died. But I am none of those. Is there another still to die . . . Who knows? (p. 133)

With these resolutions made, the canto ends and Dymer struggles to reach a tower he sees nearby. When he reaches it, he sinks down in the grass surrounding it to rest. Canto IX provides Dymer the opportunity to complete his redemption through a total giving of himself. As Dymer is lying in the grass, a great wind begins to blow—perhaps a metaphor for his coming renewal. Echoing the words of Christ on the cross, he cries out “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” though it appears his question is addressed not to the gods but to earthly beauty. Before he receives an answer, he becomes aware of a sentry, an angelic guardian in his vision. Reminiscent of Gabriel from Book IV of Paradise Lost, the sentry explains he watches for a beast who walks at night bent on destroying whoever it meets. Dymer offers to assist the sentry, but he is initially rebuffed since he is of weak human flesh. Dymer admits that while he is flesh and weak from his wound, he is eager to do some good deed. In fact, Dymer claims his past wrongs equip him the more to assist: “I am come out of great folly and shame, / The sack of cities, wrongs I must undo” (p. 133). Dymer begs to know more of this beast, and the sentry tells him of a fabulous monster and his parentage. As he listens to the story, Dymer realizes that the monster is the offspring of his sexual encounter with the unknown girl in the forest. Dymer sees now that his earlier actions have far-reaching consequences, and that it is incumbent upon him to bear the responsibility of resolving the problem he literally begat. With newly found authority, he tells the sentry he must fight the beast, “for either I must slay / This beast or else be slain before the day” (p. 134). The sentry, sensing Dymer’s words are true, agrees to his request, even offering Dymer his armor and playing the role of squire in helping Dymer put on the gear. Dymer also has the sentry agree not to intervene in the fight, regardless of the apparent outcome.

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The end of the canto is filled with battlefield imagery. The earth, where the fight is to occur, is stripped and sterile, a vivid evocation of World War I, no-man’s land. In the moments before battle and certain death, Dymer bids farewell to earthly beauty and asks to be made part of its greater whole. Like Birhtnoth, the brave but foolhardy Anglo-Saxon warrior-king of The Battle of Maldon, and the old Beowulf in his doomed fight with the dragon, Dymer is ready to face an overwhelming foe. Indeed, almost instinctively he springs forward, his armor rattling for action, when the “ashen brute wheeled slowly round / Nosing, and set its ears towards the sound, / The pale and heavy brute, rough-ridged behind, / And full of eyes, clinking in scaly rind.” Dymer throws his spear ineffectually, and his end comes quickly with little elaboration: “A leap—a cry—flurry of steel and claw, / Then silence.” All that can be seen beneath the beast are “the ruined limbs of Dymer, killed outright / All in a moment, all his story done” (p. 135). However, the poem builds to an unexpected climax. Immediately upon Dymer’s death the sun rises, the sky and landscape are flooded with rich, colorful light, and the earth bursts forth “with dancing flowers / Where flower had never grown; and one by one / The splintered woods, as if from April showers, / Were softening into green.” Additionally, songbirds trill happily as Dymer’s body is surrounded by “crocus and bluebell, primrose, [and] daffodil / Shivering with moisture.” The air itself grows sweet. All this imagery is furthered enhanced by the astonishing transformation of the beast who becomes “a wing’d and sworded shape, whose foam-like hair / Lay white about its shoulders, and the air / That came from it was burning hot. The whole / Pure body brimmed with life, as a full bowl.” Dymer’s giving of himself, his dying to destroy the monster his efforts to live autonomously created, transforms that hideous distortion into something beautiful. This explains why Lewis includes in the first edition the reference to Odin’s High Song from the Havamal: “Nine nights I hung myself upon the Tree, wounded with the spear as an offering to Odin, myself sacrificed to myself.” Dymer has not merely died, a meaningless, insignificant waste. Instead his death has transfused nature, bringing new life to the scorched, barren wasteland, a fact made clear by the final lines of the poem: And from the distant corner of day’s birth He [the sentry] heard clear trumpets blowing and bells ring, A noise of great good coming into earth And such a music as the dumb would sing If Balder had led back the blameless spring With victory, with the voice of charging spears, And in white lands long-lost Saturnian years. (p. 135)

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The allusion to Balder who was “worshipped as the pure and radiant god of innocence and light”37 is a fitting conclusion to Dymer, a narrative poem rich in Norse imagery and influence. Without question Dymer is a difficult poem, requiring careful reading and reflection. As a narrative it is coherent, but Lewis’s tendency to shift from one scene to the next without adequate transition is problematic. Given the reluctance of modern readers to read poetry in general, much less complex narrative poetry, it is not surprising Dymer has few admirers. Yet, it is the highest expression of Lewis’s earliest literary aspirations as both the many years he spent working on it and the various versions it went through clearly illustrate. Owen Barfield recalled, for instance, that the myth of Dymer had long haunted Lewis.38 Accordingly, Dymer is worth a careful reading, particularly since it shows how his strong affection for poetry consumed his earliest literary efforts. In addition, it is instructive to see how much Lewis improved his narrative technique in subsequent years when he turned to prose fiction. While Dymer was not Lewis’s final effort to write narrative poetry, it was his longest, most consciously realized effort in the genre. Although flawed, it is a workmanlike poem in which we see him exercise poetic sensibilities that mature in his prose fiction. Descend to Earth and Dymer, written during critical periods of Lewis’s poetic maturation, are columns of light throwing into relief the passion with which he aspired to achieve acclaim as a poet; moreover, both suggest the nature of his literary preoccupations before his conversion to Christianity. In short, along with Spirits in Bondage, these poems reveal a “pre-Christian” voice in Lewis that most readers have not encountered before. Lewis’s jaundiced views of God in these poems make his later apologetics all that more appealing; that is, these early poems illustrate Lewis’s theological dilemma—on the one hand he wants to deny God, while on the other he is angry with God for permitting human suffering. The fact that he later becomes the most effective Christian apologist in the twentieth century is all that more ironic. At the same time Lewis’s arguments against God revealed in these poems also suggests why he became such an effective apologist later—he knew the arguments against Christianity from the other side and this well-equipped him to offer compelling counter arguments. NOTES 1. Other surviving narrative poems (some are fragments) are: Loki Bound (1914), “On Cupid and Psyche” (1923), “The Silence of the Night” (1923), “The Nameless Isle” (August, 1930), “Launcelot” (early 1930s), and “The Queen of Drum” (1933– 1934). See C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001) for a comprehensive discussion of all these narrative poems.

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The complete texts of Loki Bound, “On Cupid and Psyche,” and “The Silence of the Night” appear in C. S. Lewis, Poet, 265–275. The complete texts of “The Nameless Isle,” “Launcelot,” and “The Queen of Drum” appear in Narrative Poems (1969). 2. For a complete discussion of this poem, see C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse, 28–35; to see the entire text, see 245–265. 3. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 72–73. The book title Lewis saw was Siegfried & The Twilight of the Gods. Translated by Margaret Armour. Illustrations by Arthur Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1911). This is the second volume of two, the first being The Rhinegold & The Valkryie. Eventually a one-volume edition is published, The Ring of Nibelung: A Trilogy with a Prelude by Richard Wagner. 4. Furthermore, Warren Lewis reproduced a lengthy essay on Richard Wagner his brother wrote while at Cherbourg House. As a piece of writing for someone this young, the essay is remarkable although it adds little to our critical understanding of Wagner. In the essay Lewis surveyed Wagner’s important work, made general comments upon opera, and finished by priggishly dismissing those incapable of appreciating opera. About the Ring he says: “His next, and perhaps his greatest work, was his immortal ‘Nibelung Ring,’ a trilogy whose three parts, the ‘Walkyrie,’ ‘Siegfried,’ and the ‘Twilight of the Gods’ are preceded by a prelude, ‘The Rhinegold.’ It is based on the great Scandinavian epic, the Nibelungen Lied or Lot, and is a beautiful piece of work.” Cited in C. S. Lewis, Poet, 28. 5. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 74–75. 6. Warren Lewis thought so, noting it was written “between the summers of 1912 and of 1913. Its absolute merit and its astonishing maturity make it . . . a remarkable production for a boy of between 14 and 15.” Cited in C. S. Lewis, Poet, 28. 7. C. S. Lewis, Poet, 28. 8. Ibid., 29. Though Lewis does not name the Rhine maidens, in Wagner they are Woglinde, Wellgunde, and Flosshilde. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. Ibid. 11. Wagner’s Alberich is shown cursing love; we do not see Lewis’s Alberich curse love, but the implication is he does. 12. Lewis’s Wotan and Frika are more sympathetically drawn than Wagner’s arrogant husband and shrewish wife; indeed, all Lewis’s characterizations are more human and less one-dimensional than Wagner’s. 13. C. S. Lewis, Poet, 31. 14. Ibid., 32. 15. Ibid., 32–33. 16. Ibid., 33. 17. Ibid., 33. 18. This scene is reminiscent both of Canto XXV of the Inferno where thieves are transfigured into loathsome giant serpents and Book X of Paradise Lost where Satan

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and the fallen angels unwillingly become huge snakes driven to consume ash and cider as a part of God’s judgment upon them for having perverted Adam and Eve. Wagner’s version also makes Alberich a serpent; why Lewis does not is puzzling. Later, of course, in Letter XXII of his Screwtape Letters he uses a serpent transformation episode, even referring to the Paradise Lost story. 19. C. S. Lewis, Poet, 34. This follows Wagner’s version. 20 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 74. 21. The complete text of Dymer is available in Narrative Poems. I offer a comprehensive discussion of the poem in C. S. Lewis, Poet, 108–136. 22. From “Preface by the Author to the 1950 Edition,” Reprinted in Narrative Poems (New York: Harvest Books, 1969), 5–6. 23. Indeed, Dymer is profoundly influenced by the poetry of Lewis’s first published book, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (London: Heinemann, 1919. Reprint, with an introduction by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984); this is clearly evident in the emotional undulations of Dymer himself, reflected by his alternating sanguine highs and morose lows. Furthermore, there are battlefield descriptions surpassing those Lewis includes in Spirits in Bondage and rivaling those written by other World War I poets. 24. The complete reference is: I ween that I hung on the windy tree Hung there for nights full nine: With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was To Othin, myself to myself, On the tree that none may ever know What root beneath it runs. From The Poetic Edda. Trans. Henry Adams Bellows (New York: The AmericanScandinavian Foundation, 1923), 60. The windy tree refers to the “ash Yggdrasil (literally ‘the Horse of Othin,’ so-called because of this story), on which Othin, in order to win the magic runes, hanged himself as an offering to himself, and wounded himself with his own spear.” 25. Canto I begins by echoing several qualities of Byron’s Don Juan. First, the narrator, whose appearance gradually fades into the background, attempts to create a friendly, conspiratorial relationship between himself and his readers: “This moment, if you join me, we begin/A partnership where both must toil to hold/The clue that I caught first. We lose or win/Together; if you read, you are enrolled” (I, 2, 1–4). Given the struggles many have understanding the poem, “toil” is not hyperbole. Furthermore, readers unaccustomed to reading narrative poetry welcome the narrator’s promise of assistance. Unfortunately, however, unlike the intrusive narrator of Don Juan, the narrator in Dymer rarely intrudes after this introduction; even when he breaks into the narrative to offer commentary, our understanding of the poem is not appreciably enhanced. Second, the rhyme schemes of the two poems, while not

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identical, are similar; both the rhyme royal of Dymer (ababbcc) and the ottava rima of Don Juan (abababcc) rely primarily on end rhyme and effectively portray the alternating morose and sanguine moods. In effect both poems contain passages fluctuating between violent agitation and sublime longing. Finally, both poems employ satire though that of Don Juan is more fully and consistently realized, while in Dymer it is limited primarily to the first few cantos. 26. C. S. Lewis, Poet, 111. From this point forward reference to C. S. Lewis, Poet will be given parenthetically. 27. For more on these parallels, C. S. Lewis, Poet, 111–112. 28. C. S. Lewis, Poet, 114. This passage will be variously interpreted and no doubt those informed by Freud have much grist for the mill here. At the least this can be seen as Dymer’s descent into hell, albeit it is one he fails to recognize, for the realm he enters is a void. 29. Her physical description clearly has affinities to Sin in Book II of Paradise Lost though Lewis’s hag lacks the serpentine qualities of Milton’s portress to hell. 30. H. A. Guerber, Myths of the Norsemen. (London: Harrap & Co., 1908), 166. 31. Ibid., 167. 32. The connection here between Dymer’s state and that of King Lear as he wanders on the heath is clear. 33. Lewis’ own war time experiences certainly inform this passage and illustrate that while Spirits in Bondage avoids explicit battlefield scenes, in Dymer he draws upon his vivid memories of the trenches to create this compelling episode. 34. Lewis says in his introduction to the 1950 edition of the poem the physical description of the Magician is based on his undergraduate memories of having twice met W. B. Yeats in Oxford. 35. C. S. Lewis, Poet, 127. Isaiah 1:18: “Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” 36. “C. S. Lewis’s Dymer.” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 1 (1980), 109. 37. Guerber, Myths of the Norsemen, 197. 38. “C. S. Lewis.” An address given at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL: October 16, 1964. The Wade Center.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Christopher, Joe. “Comments on Dymer.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 20 (Autumn 1996): 17–22. ———. “‘From the Master’s Lips’: W. B. Yeats as C. S. Lewis Saw Him.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 6 (November 1974): 14–19.

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———. “A Study of C. S. Lewis’s Dymer.” Orcrist 6 (Winter 1971–1972): 17–19. This is a revision of “Chapter Two: Dymer” from his Ph. D. Dissertation The Romances of Clive Staples Lewis, University of Oklahoma, 1969. Guerber, H. A. Myths of the Norsemen. London: Harrap & Co., 1908. Hodgens, Richard. “Notes on Narrative Poems.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 7 (April 1976): 1–14. Hooper, Walter. “Preface.” Narrative Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969, vii-xiv. King, Don W. C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001. ———. “Dymer” and “Narrative Poems.” In The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. Milne, Marjorie. “Dymer: Myth or Poem?” The Month 194 (September 1952): 170– 173. Murphy, Patrick. “C. S. Lewis’s Dymer: Once More with Hesitation.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 17 (June 1986): 1–8. Reprinted in The Poetic Fantastic: Studies in an Evolving Genre. Edited by Patrick Murphy and Vernon Hyles. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989, 63–78. Purcell, James. “Narrative Poems.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 2 (November 1972): 2–3. Sayer, George. “C. S. Lewis’s Dymer.” In SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review (1980): 94–116. Slack, Michael. “Sehnsucht and the Platonic Eros in Dymer.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 11 (August 1980): 3–7.

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Early Lyric Poetry: Spirits in Bondage (1919) and “Joy” (1924) Don W. King

Although C. S. Lewis is best known as a prose writer for his clear, lucid, literary criticism, Christian apologetics, and imaginative Ransom and Narnia stories, he actually began his publishing career as a poet. His first two published works, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926), were volumes of poetry published under the pseudonym of Clive Hamilton. In addition, he wrote many other poems that were later collected by Walter Hooper and published as Poems (1964). Hooper also published Narrative Poems in 1969, a volume that reprints Dymer as well as three other narrative poems. In addition, Hooper has published The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis (1994), a work that reprints Spirits in Bondage and Poems, but includes for the first time “A Miscellany of Additional Poems,” a supplement of seventeen other short poems.1 Despite this body of work, Lewis has not achieved acclaim as a poet. While Thomas Howard calls Poems “the best—the glorious best—of Lewis,”2 other critics view his poetry less favorably. Chad Walsh refers to Lewis as “the almost poet,”3 and Dabney Hart believes that Lewis “will never have a major place in the canon of . . . poets.”4 Charles Huttar says that given the current of critical taste, Lewis as a poet is viewed as a “minor figure” and “barring a revolution in taste, he will never be accorded a higher position.”5 On the other hand, George Sayer’s brilliant study of Dymer argues, “the time may come when it will be ranked higher than much of Lewis’s prose work.”6 W. W. Robson,

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a Lewis colleague and friend, has published an article, “The Poetry of C. S. Lewis,” in which he reevaluates his own earlier negative view of Lewis’s poetry, arguing that in some of Lewis’s poems he “touches greatness.”7 Luci Shaw has celebrated Lewis’s poetic “ability to see and probe reality and express it in vivid and illuminating metaphors.”8 While critics debate the quality of Lewis’ poetry, anyone interested in Lewis as a writer should become aware of the important role his early poetry has in shaping his literary life, particularly his aspirations to achieve acclaim as a poet and the literary influences that shaped him. Owen Barfield remembers Lewis when he first met him as one “whose ruling ambition was to become a great poet. At that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry.”9 Tracing these aspirations and influences as he moved from boyhood to mature adult is fascinating and sheds significant light upon the prose for which he later became best known. His autobiography, Surprised by Joy, letters, particularly to Arthur Greeves, diaries, and journal entries provide ample chronological evidence of his early enthusiasm for poetry, the writers most influencing him, and his sustained desire to achieve acclaim as a poet.10 Furthermore, throughout we see his attempt to establish his own theory of poetry, something he pursued throughout his life via a number of different forums culminating in his published debate with E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy.11 What all these sources make clear is how integral poetry was to Lewis’s life. He did not sip or taste poetry in a casual, off-handed manner; rather it was for him a stream intricately weaving through his life becoming a literary well—a nourishing reservoir almost without bottom— one from which he drank deeply and passionately. Lewis’s earliest efforts at writing poetry led to the publication of Spirits in Bondage, a watershed in his literary life.12 While limited in its scope and technique, Spirits in Bondage reveals much about Lewis the youthful poet and prepares the way for Dymer seven years later. Above all else, Spirits in Bondage, written under the shadow of his service in World War I, shows Lewis living as a frustrated dualist. On the one hand, in a number of morose poems he rails against man’s inhumanity to man and against a God he denies yet blames for man’s painful condition; as a whole these poems see life as demeaning, futile, and empty, primarily as a result of wartime brutalities. Other morose poems comment upon a God who is hateful, cruel, and red; Lewis intimates that this God “kills us for His sport.”13 On the other hand, many sanguine poems in Spirits in Bondage show his delight in Nature’s beauty and mystery, while others expose his longing to know more intimately a reality that transcends the merely physical, often characterized by the world of ‘faery’; overall these poems view Nature as kindly and benevolent in the lyrical and romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Yeats. Moreover, the

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sanguine poems intimate beauty is the evidence there is “something” beyond the material world, often connected to faery, and experiencing such beauty is the only way to transcend life’s bleak reality. The “Prologue” conveniently establishes the thematic bifurcation of Spirits in Bondage. Lewis identifies himself with ancient Phoenician sailors, who, after setting out for England to recover “Brethon treasure” (tin), sing of their homeland and gods as well as their looked for adventures and eventual success. They sing “above the storm and the strange sea’s wailing” in order to forget “their burden” and the hardship of a long sea journey. Like them he will use the poems of Spirits in Bondage, his “coracle of verses,” to sail “in mighty deeps alone on the chainless breezes” where he “will sing of lands unknown.” Lewis lessens his task by referring to a coracle, a diminutive water-craft-for-one that barely displaces enough water to keep from sinking, but his is a worthy effort since he strives to flee “from the scarlet city where a Lord that knows no pity / Mocks the broken people praying round his iron throne, / [and to]—Sing about the Hidden Country fresh and full of quiet green. / Sailing over seas uncharted to a port that none has seen.”14 These lines clearly illustrate Lewis’s intention to use the poetry of Spirits in Bondage in order to transcend an ugly reality characterized by a cruel god and impoverished people. In seeking the hidden country, he alludes to the world of faery where he can experience a redemptive beauty far from the flux and flow of a mean, diminished present. Though the “Prologue” lacks the grandeur of the opening lines of Paradise Lost (and Lewis is not so vain as to consider himself Milton’s equal), his desire to “sing of lands unknown” and to sail “over seas uncharted to a port that none has seen” are transparent echoes to the prologue of Paradise Lost. In effect Lewis pays homage to Milton and his invocation to the “Heavenly Muse” [(the Holy Spirit)] where he similarly requests assistance in his “adventurous song” to “pursue things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”15 “French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux)” may be the first poem Lewis wrote directly focusing upon his trench experiences, and, thus it becomes the natural place to begin considering Lewis’s morose poems focusing upon war.16 It opens with a portrayal of what an “independent contemplator” sees; trenches stretch out in either direction in an apparently endless fashion. Nearby “the jaws of a sacked village, stark and grim, / Out on the ridge have swallowed up the sun, / And in one angry streak his blood has run / To left and right along the horizon dim.” Lewis’s image of the sunset is characteristic of World War I poetry, according to Paul Fussell: “When a participant in the war wants an ironic effect, a conventional way to achieve one is simply to juxtapose a sunrise or sunset with the unlovely physical details of the war. . . . These sunrises and sunsets . . . move to the very center of English poetry of the Great War.”17 “French Nocturne” continues with the persona following a plane that appears

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to fly straight into the moon; this leads him to associate the plane’s upward movement with the world of dreams he once held dear. However, it is only a brief reprieve since the reality of the battlefield quickly recalls itself: False, mocking fancy! Once I too could dream, Who now can only see with vulgar eye That he’s no nearer to the moon than I And she’s a stone that catches the sun’s beam. What call have I to dream of anything? I am a wolf. Back to the world again, And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.

War reduces everything to the merely physical. For instance, there is nothing enchanting about the moon; it is simply a cold, reflective rock. Furthermore, soldiers cannot dream, a distinguishing human quality, since now they are vicious animals, brute predators intent on blood and destruction. Even their capacity to sing, to make harmonious music, has been reduced to the rasping, grating snapping of wolves. “Victory” continues this theme by noting how war has stripped life of its magic, mystery, and wonder. Lewis illustrates this loss of the numinous by noting the death of two mythic warrior heroes: Roland, hero of Charlemagne’s army and The Song of Roland, and Cuchulain, ancient Irish hero noted in The Cattle Raid of Cooley for single-handedly defending Ulster from the forces of Medb, queen of Connaught. In addition, he laments the passing of the mythic beauty of Helen of Troy and Iseult (from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur), the absence of faery-inhabited woodlands, dryads (tree spirits), Triton from the sea, and King Arthur. All the poetry written to celebrate these figures has been useless; even Shakespeare is deprecated: “All poets have been fools who thought to mould / A monument more durable than brass.”18 While decay marks such human efforts, what does endure is the “yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man.” Lewis may be recalling Prometheus from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a figure representing the indomitable, unbroken will of man. It is this spirit that strives mightily in the midst of war with “red Nature and her ways,” a phrase intentionally echoing Tennyson’s “Lyric 56” from In Memoriam. “Victory” is Lewis’s answer to this lyric. Tennyson suggests the human spirit will not endure against “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Lewis, while admitting “in the filth of war, the baresark shout / Of battle, [the spirit of man] is vexed,”19 affirms that the human spirit will not be crushed, a theme he returns later in “De Profundis.” In fact, the poem ends with an affirmation negating much of the poem’s earlier morose tone: “Though often bruised, oft

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broken by the rod, / Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed / Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head/And higher—till the beast become a god.” Another morose war poem that can be glossed to In Memoriam is “Spooks.” Tennyson’s “Lyric 7” imagines him standing at the door to Hallam’s home looking to grasp “a hand that can be clasped no more.” Similarly, Lewis’s poem is set outside the home of a beloved: “Last night I dreamed that I was come again/Unto the house where my beloved dwells / After long years of wandering and pain.”20 However, the lover cannot enter the “warmth and light” of his true love’s house, at first believing some “secret sin” or “old, unhappy anger” keeps him outside. However, his alienation is explained when it “suddenly came into my head / That I was killed long since and lying dead.” No doubt influenced by the many corpses Lewis saw in the trenches and on the battlefield, “Spooks” ends with the dead lover still standing outside his beloved’s home “unseen amid the winter night / And the lamp burned within, a rosy light, / And the wet street was shining in the rain.” Though moving, Lewis’s poem lacks the poignant power of Tennyson’s ending: “He is not here; but far away / The noise of life begins again, / And ghastly through the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day.” The loss of a loved one, painful regardless the context, is heightened during war since battlefields are places where death is manufactured, leading to alienation, estrangement, and isolation. Consequently, this poem demonstrates that the longing to see loved ones causes some to seek them in places once shared; in effect, both the dead and the living become spooks. “Apology” is Lewis’s most bitter and ironic war poem, giving an explanation for why he will not write verse celebrating the glory of war. He begins by addressing Despoina, another name for Persephone, Queen of Hades,21 telling her he has a reason for speaking “of nothing glad nor noble in my verse / To lighten hearts beneath this present curse / And build a heaven of dreams in real hell.”22 The poem may work on two levels. On the one hand, he directs Despoina to tell the dead why his verse is morose and cannot bring them comfort, while on the other hand, he, in the role of Despoina, explains why he will not give the lie about the glory of war to soldiers in nightmarish battlefield conditions (their “real hell”). Just as it is a cruelty to remind the dead “down in the rotting grave where the lithe worms crawl, / [Of ] green fields above that smiled so sweet,” so it is to remind soldiers, living in vile trenches where rats gorge on human flesh, of green fields back home.23 Neither the dead nor soldiers want to be told how wonderful and vital life is for those not experiencing their hell. To emphasize this, Lewis asks what good is it “to tell old tales of Troynovant / Or praises of dead heroes, tried and sage,” a slight variation on same point he makes in “Victory.” The old stories of war’s valor, heroism, and honor ring hollow: “Can it be good / To think of glory now,

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when all is done, / And all our labour underneath the sun / Has brought us this—and not the thing we would.” “This” is their “present curse”: for the dead, hell, and for the soldier, the trenches. It is as futile for them to build a case for the glory of their deeds as it was for Mammon in Book III of Paradise Lost to argue the fallen angels can build a literal Heaven in Hell: “As he [God] our darkness, cannot we his light / Imitate when we please? . . . / What can Heaven show more?”24 Though Lewis’s final comments are not as sarcastic as Beelzebub’s who mocks Mammon for “hatching vain empires,” he does reject the idea of using the old myths of glory: “All these were rosy visions of the night, / That loveliness and wisdom feigned of old. / But now we wake. The East is pale and cold, / No hope is in the dawn, and no delight.” Because of its nihilistic ending, this is Lewis’s most morose battlefield poem. Other morose poems illustrate Lewis’s attempt to come to grips with a God he does not want to exist, yet blames for human misery. Two poems with the same title offer us the chance to see how Lewis’s thoughts about his malicious God developed. “Satan Speaks” (I) begins by recalling Lewis’s comments to Greeves when he writes “I have formulated my equation Matter=Nature=Satan.”25 Later he adds Spirits in Bondage “is mainly strung round the idea that I mentioned to you before—that nature is wholly diabolical & malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.”26 The poem opens with Lewis emphasizing a God of rules, laws, and universal force: “I am Nature, the Mighty Mother, / I am the law: ye have no other.” After clearly establishing there is no grace, no charity, no empathy in this Darwinian God of Nature, he follows with couplet stanzas underscoring this God’s mechanistic nature, making frequent use of war imagery: “I am the battle’s filth and strain, / I am the widow’s empty pain. / I am the sea to smother your breath, / I am the bomb, the falling death.” This God is brutish, oppressive, insatiable, unapproachable, and destructive. However the later “Satan Speaks” (XIII) presents a slightly different God, revealing Lewis’s evolving thoughts about his “diabolical & malevolent” deity. The God here is also connected to nature—“I am the Lord your God: even he that made / Material things”—but Lewis’s blasphemous parody goes on to demonstrate this God is more “personal,” being malicious, proud, and condescending. He harangues his creatures, reminding them he uses pain and suffering to remind them he, and only he, is God, and that there is no softer, gentler deity as they would like to believe. He mocks their “dreams of some other gods,” by giving them a miserable existence, calls them vermin, and then appears surprised “they hate my world!” As if to prove his ultimate authority, he sardonically challenges “that other God” to come from his realm of glory to “steal forth my own thought’s children into light.” Then he claims the softer, gentler God (if He exists) is detached, unconcerned for man as “he walks the

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airy fields of endless day.” The poem ends with the malicious God reasserting his supremacy: “My order still is strong / And like to me nor second none I know. / Whither the mammoth went this creature too shall go.” Whether “this creature” refers to man or the softer, gentler, God, the malicious God countenances no competitors.27 He prophesies man or the other God will follow the mammoth into extinction.28 The speaker in “De Profundis” frankly challenges the authority of such a malicious deity, almost certainly reflecting Lewis’s reading of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.29 In effect, he damns this God: “Come let us curse our Master ere we die, / For all our hopes in endless ruin lie. / The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.”30 The shocking tone of this opening explains Warren Lewis’ reaction to his first reading of Spirits in Bondage when he writes to his father: While I am in complete agreement with you as to the excellence of part of IT’s book, I am of the opinion it would have been better if it had never been published. Even at 23 [Warren’s age when writing this letter] one realizes that the opinions of 20 are transient things. Jack’s Atheism is I am sure purely academic, but, even so, no useful purpose is served by endeavouring to advertise oneself as an Atheist. Setting aside the higher problems involved, it is obvious that a profession of a Christian belief is as necessary a part of a man’s mental make-up as a belief in the King, the Regular Army, and the Public Schools (January 28, 1919).31

When Lewis learned of Warren’s “misreading,” he attempted to mollify his father: “You know who the God I blaspheme is and that it is not the God that you or I worship, or any other Christian” (March 5, 1919).32 This is, of course, only a partial truth, since Lewis was not worshipping the “Christian” God at this time. Lewis’s reassurances aside, the tone of “De Profundis” reflects an angry adolescent, shaking his fist at a malicious God he denies, rejects, hates, yet fears. In a patent slap at meliorism, the popular pre-war notion the world was gradually getting better and could be improved further by human effort, Lewis says: “Four thousand years of toil and hope and thought / Wherein men laboured upward and still wrought / New worlds and better, Thou hast made as naught.” All human effort to build beautiful cities and to acquire knowledge and wisdom are nothing but offal to the malicious God, for “the earth grew black with wrong, / Our hope was crushed and silenced was our song.” The speaker momentarily entertains the thought that perhaps somewhere there is “a just God that cares for earthly pain,” but this, too, is rejected, since, even if true, “yet far away beyond our labouring night, / He wanders in the depths of endless light, / Singing alone his musics of delight.” What is left man against this malicious God, this “universal strength”? Though admitting “it is but

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froth of folly to rebel,” this is precisely what he advocates. The indomitable spirit of man will resist forever the interfering, capricious hand of a cruel, malicious God: Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee, For looking in my own heart I can prove thee, And know this frail, bruised being is above thee. Our love, our hope, our thirsting for the right, Our mercy and long seeking of the light, Shall we change these for thy relentless might? Laugh then and slay. Shatter all things of worth, Heap torment still on torment for thy mirth— Thou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.

Though foolhardy, man’s best shall not be traded for the malicious God’s might. He may kill man, even delighting in the carnage, but he will not conquer man’s will. Indeed, although it is false bravado, the speaker claims the malicious God will never truly be Lord as long as men live. The malicious deity of Spirits in Bondage is like Moloch of Milton’s Paradise Lost—angry, bloodthirsty, and vindictive.33 The last two morose poems are short meditations on the futility of life and the fear of death. “In Prison” concerns one who cries out “for the pain of man” that leads “from death to death.” One evening he imagines he transcends the earth and views in “endless depths of nothing” the earth falling as “a lonely pin-prick spark of light” through the “wide, enfolding night.” Although light is associated with it, the earth’s isolation and insignificance among the stars is emphasized: And if some tears be shed, Some evil God have power, Some crown of sorrows sit Upon a little world for a little hour— Who shall remember? Who shall care for it?34

With the angry passion of the speaker from “De Profundis” spent, all that remains “In Prison” is ennui. Instead of Christ, the world is crowned with thorns the malicious God intends for it, and what remains is for man to accept this judgment. “Alexandrines” relates the fears of the speaker about “a house that most of all on earth I hate.”35 Though he has known pain and anguish “in bloody fields, sad seas, and countries desolate,” clear allusions to wartime experiences, “yet most I fear that empty house where the grasses green / Grow

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in the silent court the gaping flags between, / And down the moss-grown paths and terrace no man treads / Where the old, old weeds rise deep on the waste garden beds.” This description takes us to a cemetery, and we realize the house he fears is his own grave. However, his is not fear of annihilation. Instead, it is his inevitable confrontation in death with the malicious God: “For in that house I know a little, silent room / Where Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom / To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast— / Yet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.”36 The broken, almost docile tone of the speaker here is a far cry from the defiant one of “De Profundis.” Taken together, however, they reveal the range of Lewis’s attitude toward the malicious God he confronted in his morose poems. Lewis’s war poems and those dealing with a malicious God reveal the extent to which he was living as a frustrated dualist. Without question Lewis’s atheism was profoundly influenced by W. T. Kirkpatrick’s, his great tutor, as well as the philosophical ideas he encountered elsewhere. Yet the battlefield horrors he witnessed informs these poems even more deeply, exposing a young man grappling to understand his place in a world that appeared to be teetering on the brink of collapse. Although his angry, defiant responses in some of the poems were immature and adolescent, they are a measure of the passion with which he imbued his poetry. It was poetry, not prose, he used to work through the crises he was experiencing, giving outward expression to his deeply internalized feelings. What saves Spirits in Bondage from turning into teenage angst, however, is the sanguine poetry representing the other dimension of Lewis’s dualism. Here, too, we find immaturity, but even greater maturity as Lewis focused upon his love of nature and beauty. Indeed, Lewis’s sanguine poems are among his first poetic attempts to put in writing his longing for joy he later recounted in Surprised by Joy; as such these poems reveal his yearning to experience transcendent truth. Ironically, in these poems, we see the genesis of Lewis the theist. The first group of sanguine poems are primarily lyrical and celebrate landscapes, rest, literature, music, nature (Wordsworthian instead of Darwinian), stars, and human love. For instance, “Irish Nocturne” celebrates Lewis’s homeland. It begins with a description of an eerie landscape with mist filling a valley like “evil drink in a wizard’s hand,” and then alludes to ghosts, demons, Grendel (the Beowulf monster), and other ominous supernatural creatures. Lewis then uses the mist as a metaphor to indicate Ireland’s obscured understanding of itself: Bitter and bitter it is for thee, O my heart, Looking upon this land, where poets sang, Thus with the dreary shroud

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Unwholesome, over it spread, And knowing the fog and the cloud In her people’s heart and head Even as it lies for ever upon her coasts Making them dim and dreamy lest her sons should ever arise And remember all their boasts.37

The poem ends with Lewis lamenting this mist since it breeds “lonely desire and many words and brooding and never a deed.” Lewis’s complaint against his countrymen for being dreamers and talkers rather than doers is stereotypical; however, because Lewis does not connect this poem to a specific incident, it is difficult to know how seriously we should take his lament. Another landscape poem, “The Roads,” returns us to Lewis’s favorite spot near Belfast: “I stand on the windy uplands among the hills of Down / With all the world spread out beneath, meadow and sea and town, / And ploughlands on the far-off hills that glow with friendly brown.”38 From this vantage point, Lewis looks out upon roads extending to the horizon in several directions. As his eye follows them, he feels a strong pull: “And the call of the roads is upon me, a desire in my spirit has grown / To wander forth in the highways, ’twixt earth and sky alone, / And seek for the lands no foot has trod and the seas no sail has known.” The urge to explore, to find adventure, to discover, suggests this is an early poem, perhaps written in 1915, and marks it as well as one where he articulated early his yearning to find deep satisfaction in unknown external experiences.39 If related to “Irish Nocturne” it also intimates that travel down these roads can be the escape from the homeland he loves yet laments. Moving from an affection for the landscape, Lewis’s “Night” (IX) and “To Sleep,” a pair he intends to be read together, are sanguine pieces on rest. In “Night” (IX) he pictures night as a necessary comforter: “After the fret and failure of this day, / And weariness of thought, O Mother Night, / Come with soft kiss to soothe our care away / And all our little tumults set to right.”40 Like Shakespeare and Keats before him, Lewis finds sleep a simile for death when he calls sleep “most pitiful of all death’s kindred fair.” Imitating Keats’ lyricism in particular, Lewis envisions Night as a goddess who drives a pair of magic steeds: Thou from the fronting rim Bending to urge them, whilst thy sea-dark hair Fall in ambrosial ripples o’er each limb, With beautiful pale arms, untrammeled, bare For horsemanship, to those twin chargers fleet Dost give full rein across the fires that glow

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In the wide floor of heaven, from off their feet Scattering the powdery star-dust as they go.

The poem ends as it begins as Lewis underlines night as a solace to man’s weary life: “thou still art used to bind / With tenderest love of careful leeches’ art / The bruised and weary heart / In slumber blind.” Though derivative, this poem gives evidence of Lewis’s working hard at the craft of poetry as well as its own dualism: the peace of night contrasts with the busyness of day. “To Sleep” continues this focus upon rest and is influenced by Keats’ “Sonnet to Sleep” and “Ode to Psyche.” Here Lewis seeks to retreat to “a hidden wood among the hill-tops green, / Full of soft streams and little winds that creep / The murmuring boughs between” where “in the fragrant twilight I will raise / A secret altar of the rich sea sod, / Whereat to offer sacrifice and praise / Unto my lonely god.”41 His earnest devotion to build such an altar, covering it with poppies,42 is not altruistic, for he hopes such worship will be rewarded by “dreams of dear delight / And draughts of cool oblivion, quenching pain, / And sweet, half-wakeful moments in the night / To hear the falling rain.” Although not directly a war poem, Lewis’s desire for “draughts of cool oblivion, quenching pain” could mark this as more than a poem about his wanting sleep to refresh him from a particularly stressful day of academic study. The poem’s concluding lines are a request that sleep silence the day’s pain, extending perhaps to a similar desire at his death: “And when he meets me at the dusk of day / To call me home for ever, this I ask— / That he may lead me friendly on that way / And wear no frightful mask.” “Sonnet,” is still another Keatsian poem about sleep, and while sanguine, its tone is darker and may contain a veiled death wish. In the poem, set in a “dreaming garden still and sweet,” the speaker longs “for a chamber dim, a pillow meet / For slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet, / Cool, white and smooth.” This time the poppies of sleep are like a “magic sponge” and can wipe away the hours or even the years: “Why not a year, / Why could a man not loiter in that bower / Until a thousand painless cycles wore, / And then—what if it held him evermore?” While “Night” (IX) and “To Sleep” portray rest as a necessary antidote to life’s tumult, “Sonnet” suggests there is a more permanent way to achieve rest, one that is lasting. This sequence of sanguine poems urging rest and retreat lead to two lyrics whose themes are withdrawal. “Milton Read Again (in Surrey)” is in the tradition of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” or Wordsworth’s “London, 1802” (another panegyric to Milton); that is, it is a poem praising an author who influenced the writer.43 Lewis’s delight at being sent to study with Kirkpatrick and his withdrawal from Malvern and all he detested there created the context for this poem. Since we have already seen

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how highly Lewis regarded Milton, the poem is no surprise. In particular, Lewis appears to be celebrating his recent rereading of Paradise Lost: “Three golden months while summer on us stole / I have read your joyful tale another time, / Breathing more freely in that larger clime / And learning wiselier to deserve the whole.”44 Of course here Lewis’s debt to Milton is primarily poetic not theological, though given Lewis’s eventual turn to faith in Christ and his A Preface to Paradise Lost, we may see in “Milton Read Again” the dormant seeds of his later conversion. Regardless, Lewis credits Milton with guiding him to the treasures of poetry, opening his eyes to a rich imagination where before his has been barren. He compares his reading of Milton to one who returns to walk a familiar wood, suddenly overcome with “the weird spirit of unexplained delight, / New mystery in every shady place, / In every whispering tree a nameless grace, / New rapture on the windy seaward height.” “Lullaby,” another poem of withdrawal, focuses not upon literature but instead upon the power of music.45 Recalling Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” the poem describes three maidens who inhabit the upper chamber of a tower, who “spin both night and day,” though in the evening they are transformed into swans.46 They fly to the woods nearby “singing in swans’ voices high / A lonely, lovely lullaby.” More lyrical than “Milton Read Again,” “Lullaby” has affinities with “The Ocean Strand” and “Noon” for both its language and use of female figures. Moving from sanguine poems emphasizing rest or retreat, we see in “Hymn (For Boys’ Voices)” a poem where Lewis says the wonders of nature’s beauty are ever before us and accessible to us if only we will open our eyes and see. The things magicians do, the games faeries play, nature’s power, immortality, even God’s perspective—all these and more—can be ours: “If we could but understand! / We could revel day and night / In all power and all delight / If we learned to think aright.”47 Affirming this, however, does not make it happen, and the poem gives us no way to do what he recommends other than the poem’s circular argument. Directly related to “Hymn” and following it in Spirits in Bondage is “Our Daily Bread,” beginning: “We need no barbarous words nor solemn spell / To raise the unknown. It lies before our feet.”48 This poem also does not give us a coherent means to see what Lewis does. However it surpasses “Hymn” in its personal view as Lewis explains his visits to favorite spots in nature create the context where “the Living voices call” him, and he catches “a sight of lands beyond the wall, / I see a strange god’s face.” Furthermore, he intimates the allure of such visions will one day pull him out of the work-a-day world: And some day this will work upon me so I shall arise and leave both friends and home

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And over many lands a pilgrim go Through alien woods and foam, Seeking the last steep edges of the earth Whence I may leap into that gulf of light Wherein, before my narrowing Self had birth, Part of me lived aright.

Lewis returns to the idea of being a pilgrim looking for beauty below in “Song of the Pilgrims.” Also of note is Lewis’s clear debt to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”: Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty water rolling evermore.

Lewis’s longing to become a part of the mysterious beauty of nature he sees is given expression more effectively in later poems where he directly connects nature to faery. Sanguine poems unified by a focus upon faery, including specific faery creatures, general observations about faery, and the longing for faery have a central place in Spirits in Bondage. Lewis’s affection for faery culminates in a series of poems illustrating his idea that the faery world proves transcendent beauty exists.49 “The Satyr” describes the mythological creature normally thought of as a personification of Nature, appearing in literature under various names, Pan chief among them.50 In the poem a satyr is pictured as heralding the arrival of spring by dancing through forest, meadow, and valley “carolling” and “making music evermore” as a means of rallying his “faerie kin.” Lewis’s physical description of the satyr gives the traditional view of him as half man/half goat, combining both native beauty with the darker suggestion (“his dreadful feet are cloven”) of veiled power and mystery: Though his brow be clear and white And beneath it fancies bright, Wisdom and high thoughts are woven And the musics of delight, Though his temples too be fair Yet two horns are growing there Bursting forth to part asunder All the riches of his hair.51

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The cloven feet and horns interrupt the reverie, not necessarily suggesting the demonic but hinting at danger. This is heightened when the poem concludes by emphasizing another traditional attribute of the satyr, sexual licentiousness: “Faerie maidens he may meet / Fly the horns and cloven feet, / But, his sad brown eyes with wonder / Seeing—stay from their retreat.” The power of the satyr to lure maidens with “his sad brown eyes” is the first instance in Spirits in Bondage (“The Satyr” is the third poem in the volume) of a concept Lewis repeatedly underscores: the power of faery to draw us out of this world and into one of beauty, mystery, and danger. In one of the few sanguine poems in Spirits in Bondage linked to dreams, “L’Apprenti Sorcier” concerns the power of faery to tempt the dreamer from bitter, dark, dreams to ones suggesting harmony. A dreamer hears the sound of mighty ocean breakers crashing on the distant shore of a realm inhabited by “frightful seraphim” and a fierce, cold, God whose eyes promise “hate and misery / And wars and famines yet to be.” As he stands before the deafening breakers, he catches a vision of faery: “Out of the toiling sea arose / Many a face and form of those / Thin, elemental people dear / Who live beyond our heavy sphere.”52 They speak, inviting him to join them: “Leap in! Leap in, and take thy fill Of all the cosmic good and ill, Be as the Living ones that know Enormous joy, enormous woe, Pain beyond thought and fiery bliss: For all thy study hunted this, On wings of magic to arise, And wash from off thy filmed eyes The clouds of cold mortality.”

Their invitation to submerge with them—to learn of good and evil, to know ultimate happiness and sorrow, to experience ecstatic sensory realities—is extremely attractive, for the dreamer has been searching for this all his life. Their call, therefore, to discover with them “real life” and their scorn if he slinks “again / Back to the narrow ways of men” pull strongly at him. With them he can enter faery and realize the opportunity to experience final truth. However, the poem ends much as dreams do: “So all these mocked me as I stood / Striving to wake because I feared the flood.” His desire to awaken before he has to decide leaves the ending inconclusive, but again we see in the poem Lewis’s fascination with faery’s pull on him. “Song of the Pilgrims” continues this theme of the longing for faery; indeed, it is Lewis’s fullest expression of this yearning. The poem portrays a group of

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pilgrims who have been journeying endlessly trying to discover faery peoples and their land, here personified as “dwellers at the back of the North Wind.”53 The pilgrims have been told by some that there is no realm of faery, “but, ah God! we know / That somewhere, somewhere past the Northern snow / Waiting for us the red-rose gardens blow.” Because of this conviction, the pilgrims Have forsaken all things sweet and fair, We have found nothing worth a moment’s care Because the real flowers are blowing there. Land of the Lotus fallen from the sun, Land of the Lake from whence all rivers run, Land where the hope of all our dreams is won!

The promise of real life, the fulfillment of all desires, the living out of dreams are more than enough to stimulate the pilgrims in their quest. Like Odysseus’ sailors enchanted by the island of the Lotus eaters, so these pilgrims do not want to be deflected in their search for faery. While they go on to admit that day-to-day life deadens them to perceiving faery and that even as they approach faery it causes them to tremble, they long to “wake again in gardens bright / Of green and gold for infinite delight, / Sleeping beneath the solemn mountains white.” In faery they imagine a realm untouched by time where songbirds never cease singing, where queens rule without break, and where poets write forever and “whisper a wild, sweet song” revealing the deepest truths of the universe. It is their longing to merge with the eternal that drives the pilgrims. In their review of why they keep missing faery, they note having journeyed near places associated in the past with faery, wondering if they miss it because they have sinned. Or, they consider, “is it all a folly of the wise, / Bidding us walk these ways with blinded eyes / While all around us real flowers arise?” Perhaps this world is where they find “real flowers.” Such self-doubt is only momentary and the poem ends with their powerful affirmation: “But, by the very God, we know, we know / That somewhere still, beyond the Northern snow / Waiting for us the red-rose gardens blow.” The pilgrim’s search for a real, eternal, nonchanging world indicates Lewis’s own deeply felt Platonism, but their desire is not for a Platonic realm of forms; instead, they seek the richly imagined world of faery, one in a sense beyond both the earthly and Platonic. Though the pilgrims never answer the question of whether or not it is their sin that keeps them from entering faery, we should remember that traditionally pilgrims move from a state of sin to one of grace through the act of pilgrimage itself. It could be these pilgrims are nearer faery than they know.

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In the only poem of Spirits in Bondage dealing with romantic love, Lewis imagines in “World’s Desire” a kind of Valhalla of love; that is, the poem concerns a castle “built” in a desolate country, the whole scene strongly reminiscent of Wagner’s influence upon Lewis: Where the trees are grim and great, Blasted with the lightning sharp—giant boulders strewn between, And the mountains rise above, and the cold ravine Echoes to the crushing roar and thunder of a mighty river Raging down a cataract.54

In the midst of this rugged, wild, land, a castle rises, its towers strong, its gates “made of ivory, the roofs of copper red.” Guarded by warders and “wakeful dragons,” nothing can assail it, for it is “a resting-place, dear heart, for you and me.” Faery touches the poem when a wild faery maiden who, homeless and torn by the forests, wanders beneath the castle: “Often to the castle gate up she looks with vain endeavour, / For her soulless loveliness to the castle winneth never.” The castle is an escape, a retreat for the speaker and his beloved: “Within the sacred court, hidden high upon the mountain, / Wandering in the castle gardens lovely folk enough there be, / Breathing in another air, drinking of a purer fountain / And among that folk, beloved, there’s a place for you and me.” In this pinnacle of love, this fortress of passion, the speaker and his beloved will find the best place to dwell. Human love signals beauty, Lewis suggests, and in the midst of daily routine, love is its own castle of desire. If this is a battlefield poem, Lewis’s longing to escape his terrible present for a palace of love is surely understandable. Three poems include details about both war and beauty; as a result, they may be efforts by Lewis to bridge the bifurcation of Spirits in Bondage. “Oxford” itself shows bifurcation in that its first, fourth, and fifth stanzas concern how an enclave like Oxford serves as a citadel for beauty, while the second and third stanzas present war as a threat to such beauty. Lewis begins by saying it is good there are “palaces of peace / And discipline and dreaming and desire, / Lest we forget our heritage and cease / The Spirit’s work—to hunger and aspire.”55 His use of “Spirit” is that of the “something” we have seen previously, and links his aspirations not with Christian faith but instead with transcendent beauty. In the second stanza he notes places like Oxford remind us beauty lives on in spite of the fact we now are “tangled in red battle’s animal net, / Murder the work and lust the anodyne.” The third stanza continues this thought, noting that unlike the battlefield where men are reduced to surviving on animal instincts, Oxford “has nothing of the beast, / That was not built for gross, material gains, / Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast.” The final

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two stanzas leave the battlefield entirely (“we are not wholly brute”), focusing rather upon Oxford’s function as a lighthouse of dreams, visions, aspirations, and beauty; if it is a kind of fortress in the midst of war, it is “a refuge of the elect.” Oxford becomes an emblem of beauty’s survival regardless the swirl of war: “She was not builded out of common stone / But out of all men’s yearning and all prayer / That she might live, eternally our own, / The Spirit’s stronghold—barred against despair.” This is not Lewis’s attempt “to build a heaven out of hell” so much as it is his effort to remind himself and others that wartime brutality is not the only reality. It may be the most immediate one for soldiers, even one not easily put aside, but in “Oxford” he recalls there is another reality, a place where men aspire for beauty rather than gunshot, and one that gives motivation to him to live beyond the brute. “Dungeon Grates” is Lewis’s most comprehensive attempt to illustrate how faery is the evidence of transcendent beauty and how such beauty contradicts the sense produced by war that human existence is meaningless. Man’s essential condition, heightened by war, the opening lines suggest, is one of loneliness, grief, burdens, and pain; these beat him down toward his death except for those moments when he captures “a sudden glimpse of spirit faces.”56 That is, though his life may appear to be lived in a cell behind dungeon bars, the apprehension of beauty, “the fragrant breath” of “flowery places,” the longing “for which the hearts of men are always sore,” reminds man of another reality beyond time. Anticipating what he comes to hammer home consistently in Surprised by Joy, however, Lewis says this reality is not one to seek actively: It lies beyond endeavour; neither prayer Nor fasting, nor much wisdom winneth there, Seeing how many prophets and wise men Have sought for it and still returned again With hope undone.

In fact, beauty comes unlooked for, serendipitously: “But only the strange power / Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour / Can build a bridge of light or sound or form / To lead you out of all this strife and storm.” For the first time he attempts to explain how beauty leads us, claiming that when we mesh with beauty, when “we are grown a part” of it until “from its very glory’s midmost heart / Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light / Into our souls,” then we will see all things as they really are, “seven times more true than what for truth we hold / In vulgar hours.” This Wordsworthian ethos culminates in lines reminiscent of “Tintern Abbey”:

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The miracle is done And for one little moment we are one With the eternal stream of loveliness That flows so calm, aloof from all distress Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire Making us faint with overstrong desire To sport and swim for ever in its deep.

Though such epiphanies are momentary and rare, we feed off them for a long time, sustained by them because through them “we know we are not made of mortal stuff.” Indeed, such momentary visitations of beauty help us survive our otherwise burdensome human condition: “And we can bear all trials that come after, / The hate of men and the fool’s loud bestial laughter / And Nature’s rule and cruelties unclean, / For we have seen the Glory—we have seen.” As we shall see below, Lewis’s poem “Joy” (1924) reexamines this same notion with a rather different and unexpected resolution. Here, however, Lewis honors the visitations of beauty as a harbinger whereby man can endure an otherwise dark, meaningless world. “Death in Battle” we know is a war poem, because it was for that very reason first published by John Galsworthy in Reveille.57 From the beginning the poem is escapist, with a particular longing to transcend the battlefield for “the peaceful castle, rosy in the West, / In the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide sea’s breast.” This desire is a direct result of battlefield experiences that have pressed “and driven and hurt” him almost beyond bearing; he has been blindly fighting “among men cursing in fight and toiling.” As a consequence, he longs to escape, to be alone, “to be ever alone,” above and beyond the turmoil of the fray, “in flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod, / In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God.” In such a retreat he no longer will have to see “the brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown / Into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own.” This realm of transcendent peace blots out war’s tumult: “O Country of Dreams! / Beyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away, / Out of the sound of battles, near to the end of day, / Full of dim woods and streams.” As he does in “Oxford” and “Dungeon Grates,” Lewis resolves his frustrated dualism in “Death in Battle” via beauty. Only beauty can atone for war’s hell. One other early poem must be mentioned here. “Joy,” published in 1924, is a critically important poem because in it Lewis renames the longing for transcendent beauty he wrote about so passionately in the sanguine poems of Spirits in Bondage; indeed, this poem was Lewis’s earliest published attempt

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to describe the essence of joy.58 While Surprised by Joy is an almost exhaustive attempt by Lewis late in his life to chronicle his determined pursuit for joy, in this early poem he sketches a sleeper’s awakening to unexpected joy and beauty.59 Alluding to the myth of Leda and the swan, where Zeus in the form of a gigantic bird ravishes a beautiful girl, Lewis compares the sleeper’s wakening to this event: “As I woke, / Like a huge bird, Joy with the feathery stroke / Of strange wings brushed me over.”60 As Leda is overcome and overwhelmed by the swan, so the sleeper is by Joy, which then touches “the lair / Of each wild thing and woke the wet flowers everywhere.” Drunk with such joy, the speaker believes he will have this powerfully vital sense of joy so constantly “that this mood could never die.” Indeed, at least briefly he glories in the belief the joy he is experiencing makes him master of all he sees, even liberating him to see clearly and understand fully all that life holds for him: “Like Christian [from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress] when his burden dropt behind, / I was set free. Pure colour purified my mind.” Yet he pauses after this and realizes: We do not know the language Beauty speaks, She has no answer to our questioning, And ease to pain and truth to one who seeks I know she never brought and cannot bring. But, if she wakes a moment, we must fling Doubt at her feet, not answered, yet allayed. She beats down wisdom suddenly. We cling Fast to her flying skirts and she will fade Even at the kiss of welcome, into deepest shade.61

This passage recalls Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in several ways. On the one hand, Lewis takes issue with Shelley’s claim that only Beauty can give “grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream” since for him beauty “has no answer to our questioning.” On the other hand, he supports Shelley’s vow to “dedicate my powers / To thee and thine” so that when Beauty comes, one can find in her an “awful LOVELINESS, / [That] wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.” For Lewis Beauty is the swan beating wisdom down on the passive receiver; for Shelley Beauty is “the awful shadow of some unseen Power . . . Which like the truth / Of nature on my passive youth / Descended, to my onward life supply / Its calm.” As Lewis’s poem continues, the speaker’s sober realization that Beauty “will not stay” echoes Shelley’s lament: “Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate / With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon / Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone?” However, at this point the two

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poems diverge radically. Shelley, while admitting Beauty is imperceptible, inconstant, and shadowy, still affirms it is ever-present although we may not realize this since it “floats . . . unseen amongst us.” Lewis’s speaker disagrees: And then I knew that this was all gone over. I shall not live like this another day. To-morrow I’ll go wandering, a poor lover Of earth, rejected, outcast every way, And see not, hear not. Rapture will not stay Longer than this, lest mortals grow divine And old laws change too much. The sensitive ray Of Beauty, her creative vision fine, Pass. I am hers, but she will not again be mine.62

For Lewis the breath of joy Beauty brings carries with it the melancholic realization it cannot last. Joy, full of aching beauty, is fleeting. The sense the speaker will never again experience Beauty contrasts sharply with Lewis’s views in Surprised by Joy and elsewhere. This is not surprising when we recall this poem is written before Lewis connects his lifelong pursuit of joy with realizing in Christ the joy he desires: “But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian . . . It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.”63 As a young man in his twenties, still struggling to achieve both academic success and literary acclaim and laboring under a genetic and philosophic moroseness exacerbated by the recent horrors of World War I, Lewis’s misgivings about joy’s capacity to offer him solace is to be expected. An overall evaluation of Lewis’s early poems suggests several things. First, the title of his first published work, Spirits in Bondage, underscores the bifurcation discussed above; that is, the book is about how the spirit of man— variously portrayed in the poems as either proud and indomitable or longing for beauty—is shackled by an earthly existence marked by suffering and theological uncertainty. Spirits in Bondage shows Lewis clearly disturbed by his sense that human life was directed by a malicious God, yet the many poems focusing upon faery provided him evidence of a mitigating, transcendental beauty. Second, his use of the lyric leads to many poems where we glimpse his deeply felt emotional life, but it also limits his range of poetic sensibilities. For instance, though he grappled with theological and aesthetic conundrums, the short nature of the lyric prevented him from anywhere working out a resolution to the tensions he was experiencing. Third, his early poetry gives

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Lewis hope he might some day achieve acclaim as a poet. The rigor of academic study at Oxford after the war, while not a death knell to his muse, certainly muted his poetic efforts; quite properly he invested most of his time into high-level academic achievement as an undergraduate. Still, we know he continued to write poetry as letters and diaries indicate, and he actively sought to see his poetry published. Fourth, the fourteen poems in Spirits in Bondage influenced by his wartime experiences are deeply felt and communicate more immediately the reality of his experiences in France than his memories of the war later recorded in Surprised by Joy. Finally, his experience in writing Spirits in Bondage, particularly the war poems, served him well, though he largely abandoned lyric poetry from 1922–1926 to devote himself to a long narrative poem, Dymer, where he attempted to consider again the tensions he first explored in Spirits in Bondage.

NOTES 1. For a comprehensive discussion of Lewis’ early poetry, see my C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), chapters 1–3. One line of discussion I follow there is the relationship between Lewis’s war poetry and that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. 2. Thomas Howard, “Poems: A Review,” Christianity Today 9 (June 18, 1965), 30. 3. Chad Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 35. 4. Dabney Hart, “Editor’s Comment,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (Fall 1989), 128. 5. Charles Huttar, “A Lifelong Love Affair with Language: C. S. Lewis’s Poetry,” in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 86. 6. George Sayer, “C. S. Lewis’s Dymer,” in Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, 1 (1980), 113. 7. W. W. Robson, “The Poetry of C. S. Lewis,” The Chesterton Review 17(iii–iv) (August–November, 1991), 437. 8. Luci Shaw, “Looking Back to Eden: The Poetry of C. S. Lewis,” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 23 (February 1992), 3. 9. Barfield, address at Wheaton College, October 16, 1974. 10. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955). 11. With E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy (London: Oxford University Press, 1939).

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12. C. S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (London: Heinemann, 1919). Reprinted, with an introduction by Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984); subsequent references are to this edition. 13. Peter Schakel in his Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984) devotes a thoughtful chapter to Lewis’s poetry in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer. Arguing the poetry demonstrates “a bifurcation and tension between the rationalism and the romantic”(p. 93) aspects of Lewis’s personality, Schakel says “in [Spirits in Bondage] its ‘enlightened’ rationalism on the one hand and deep sense of longing for a world of the spirit on the other, the collection provides an early and immature version of themes which would be treated much more satisfactorily in Till We Have Faces” (p. 94). He then offers cogent though brief comments upon “De Profundis” (where he says these opposing themes are united), “The Philosopher,” “The Escape,” “Dungeon Grates,” and “How He Saw Angus the God.” Schakel says the volume as a whole “is uneven as a collection of poetry: there are a few gems, usually brief passages rather than entire poems. Its strength is expression of youthful emotions rather than handling of poetic skills. Its best quality as poetry is its visual imagery” (p. 98). 14. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, xli. 15. Furthermore, the “Prologue” returns us to Lewis’s penchant toward heavy allusion noted in his early poetry. Actually, Spirits in Bondage includes allusions to Greek, Latin, Celtic, Norse, Irish, English, and biblical sources. There are also numerous references to singing and music. 16. Walter Hooper in the “Preface” to Spirits in Bondage suggests this poem dates somewhere around December 1917, within a month of Lewis reaching the trenches; see p. xxx. 17. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 55. In Surprised by Joy Lewis also notes that even before he went to the trenches, “I attended almost entirely to what I thought awe-inspiring, or wild, or eerie, and above all to distance. Hence mountains and clouds were my especial delight; the sky was, and still is, to me one of the principal elements in any landscape” (p. 152). 18. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 7. Lewis has in mind Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 55” that begins: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” Hooper speculates this poem dates from Christmas 1916. See his “Preface” to Spirits in Bondage, xxv–xxvi. 19. In the legends associated with Cuchulain, when he becomes enraged he is transformed into a hideous monster akin to a Scandinavian berserker. 20. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 11. 21. Two essays address the identity of Despoina: Joe R. Christopher’s, “Is ‘D’ for Despoina?” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 85 (Spring 1994): 48–59, and John Bremer’s “From Despoina to Diotima: The Mistress of C. S. Lewis” The Lewis Legacy 61 (Summer 1994), 6–18.

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22. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 12. Lewis shows his indebtedness to Milton as the last line here recalls Satan in Paradise Lost who claims: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” (I, 254–255). 23. Lewis’s allusion to the Inferno in these lines support the argument Despoina is being directed to speak to the dead. 24. Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 269–270, 273. 25. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914−1963), ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 214. 26. Ibid., 230. 27. The Tennysonian allusion to lyrics 55–57 of In Memoriam suggests “this creature” is man. 28. The implications of Lewis’s theological dualism is beyond the scope of this study. While a poem like this clearly suggests Lewis may have embraced such dualism for a brief time, it is not a position he holds very long. Much later in Mere Christianity he writes convincingly against holding this position, since logically it assumes even if there are two gods, a “good” one and a “bad” one, there must be another god behind these two that created them. 29. The title literally means “from the abyss,” and is both an ironic allusion to Psalm 130: 1–2 (“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy”) and a gloss to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1905). About the latter Lewis writes to Greeves on September 18, 1919: “De Profundis” is hardly more than a memory to me. I seem to remember that it had considerable beauties, but of course in his serious work one always wonder how much is real and how much is artistic convention. He must have suffered terribly in prison, more perhaps than many a better man. I believe “The Ballad of Reading Goal” [1898] was written just after he came out, and before he had had time to smelt down his experiences into artificiality, and that it [Lewis’s emphasis] rather than “De Profundis” represents the real effect on his mind. In other words the grim bitterness is true: the resignation not quite so true. Of course one gets very real bitterness in D. P. too. (They Stand Together, p. 260) Wilde, a fellow Irishman, rebel, and poet, clearly interested Lewis at this time in his life. 30. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 20–21. 31. W. H. Lewis, Letters and Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850–1930, VI, 84. 32. Ibid., 96. 33. Lewis’s view of God in Spirits in Bondage is similar to George Meredith, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy, late nineteenth-century British poets. In particular this recalls Housman’s lines from “The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux”: “We for certainty are not the first/Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled/Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed/Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.”

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34. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 19. 35. Ibid., 41. 36. For another interesting comparison to In Memoriam, see “Lyric 22.” 37. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 9–10. 38. Ibid., 63–64. 39. This dating would place the poem before the Easter 1916 Irish uprising and Yeats’s subsequent poem with the same title. 40. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 16. 41. Ibid., 18. 42. Interestingly, poppies came to be the flower symbolic of World War I, representing both heroic sacrifice and unimaginable bloodshed. 43. Though it is impossible to date this poem precisely, it certainly was written while Lewis studied with Kirkpatrick. 44. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 32. 45. This poem is first mentioned in a letter to Greeves on June 3, 1918, after he returns from France to recover from his wounds. See They Stand Together, p. 220. Since Lewis refers in the poem to Oxford, it is possible he writes the earliest version of the poem after he matriculates at University College, April 1917. 46. The three maidens may also be linked to the Norns of Norse mythology. 47. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 59. 48. Ibid., 60. 49. Joe R. Christopher’s “C. S. Lewis Dances among the Elves: A Dull and Scholarly Survey of Spirits in Bondage and ‘The Queen of Drum’” quickly surveys eleven poems in the volume with “poetic references to fairies and elves” (p. 11). In most of these poems (“Te Ne Quaesieris,” “The Autumn Morning,” “Victory,” “Our Daily Bread,” “In Praise of Solid People,” “Ballade Mystique,” “Night,” “Song of the Pilgrims,” “World’s Desire,” “Song,” “Hymn [for Boys’ Voices],” and “The Satyr”) Christopher focuses upon how Lewis uses supernatural creatures “as a symbol of the mysterious, the Romantic, the dream of escape. In short, they are psychological symbols” (p. 12). He concludes his comments on these poems by noting Lewis has established “the land of faerie as an ideal of Romantic escape and the faeries, with one or two clear exceptions, as the attractive inhabitants of this golden realm” (p. 14). Christopher also sees the “The Satyr” as a depiction of the Victorian man— half human and half bestial. 50. This poem may later influence Lewis’s portrayal of Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 51. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, 5. 52. Ibid., 39. 53. Ibid., 47. Many readers will catch Lewis’s possible allusion here to George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind. 54. Ibid., 72. 55. Ibid., 57.

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56. Ibid., 25. 57. “Death in Battle.” Reveille 3 (February 1919), 508. Under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. In Spirits in Bondage, 74. 58. We know Lewis was working on this poem before April 18, 1922: “In the evening I copied out ‘Joy’ and worked a new ending: it is ready to be typed” (All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1991, 22.) Interestingly, the editor who accepts if for publication in The Beacon is Owen Barfield: “A letter from Barfield accepting ‘Joy’ for the Beacon and saying nice things” (All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, May 2, 1922, 28). However, it is two years before the poem is actually published in The Beacon 3(31) (May 1924), 444–445 (Clive Hamilton). Reprinted in Collected Poems, 243–244. 59. Lewis, Surprised by Joy has numerous passages where Lewis discusses joy; see in particular pp. 16–18 and pp. 165–170. In addition, see Lewis’s “Preface” to The Pilgrim’s Regress where he offers an extended definition of what he means by joy and how it works in his experience. 60. Lewis, “Joy,” 444. It is interesting to note that Lewis and Yeats use Leda in a poem at about the same time; see Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” (1923). 61. Ibid., 444–445. 62. Ibid., 445. 63. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 238.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barfield, Owen. “C. S. Lewis.” An address given at Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL), October 16, 1964. The Wade Center. Bremer, John. “From Despoina to Diotima: The Mistress of C. S. Lewis.” The Lewis Legacy 61 (Summer 1994), 6–18. Christopher, Joe R. “Is ‘D’ for Despoina?” The Canadian C. S Lewis Journal: The Inklings, Their Friends, and Their Predecessors 85 (Spring 1994), 48–59. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gilchrist, K. James. “2nd Lieutenant Lewis.” In SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 17 (2000), 61–78. Hart, Dabney. “Editor’s Comment.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (Fall 1989): 125–128. Hooper, Walter. ed. All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1991 ———. The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis. London: Fount, 1994. ———.“Preface.” In C. S. Lewis. Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984, xi–xl.

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———. “Introduction” and “Introductory Letter.” In C. S. Lewis. The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis. London: Fount, 1994, ix–xxi. Howard, Tom. “Poems: A Review.” Christianity Today 9 (June 18, 1965), 30. Kawano, Roland. “C. S. Lewis’s Early Poems.” The Living Church 186 (February 13, 1983), 9–10. King, Don W. C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001. ———. “C. S. Lewis’s Spirits in Bondage: World I Poet as Frustrated Dualist.” Christian Scholar’s Review 27 (Summer 1998), 454–474. ———. “Lost but Found: The ‘Missing’ Poems of C. S. Lewis’s Spirits in Bondage.” Christianity and Literature 53 (Winter 2004), 163–201. ———. “Spirits in Bondage.” In The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. Lewis, C. S. The Pilgrim’s Regress. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1933. ———. Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics. London: Heinemann, 1919. Reprint, with an Introduction by Walter Hooper, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. ———. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, 1955 Lewis, W. H. Letters and Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850–1930. Unpublished manuscript, 11 volumes. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. Robson, W. W. “The Poetry of C. S. Lewis.” The Chesterton Review 17(iii–iv) (August–November, 1991), 437–443. Also see his essay “The Romanticism of C. S Lewis.” Cambridge Quarterly 1 (Summer 1966), 252–272. Reprinted in W. W. Robson. Critical Essays. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Sayer, George. “C. S. Lewis’s Dymer.” In SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 1 (1980), 94–116. Shaw, Luci. “Looking Back to Eden: The Poetry of C. S. Lewis.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. 23 (February, 1992), 1–7. Reprinted in Radix 21(iii) (1993), 12–15, 30. Walsh, Chad. The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

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Topical Poems: C. S. Lewis’s Postconversion Poetry Don W. King

Notwithstanding the narrative poems discussed in a previous essay, Lewis largely gave up writing narrative poetry after the disappointing reception of Dymer. However, he did not give up on poetry. Indeed, he continued to write and to publish poems from 1932 to 1963, and they appeared in journals, periodicals, and anthologies. Fortunately, they are readily accessible since many were later collected by Walter Hooper and published as Poems (1964) and Collected Poems (1994).1 They are literally topical poems—ones in which he deals with social, literary, philosophical, personal, or religious topics.2 If we consider the sheer number of topical poems Lewis published after Dymer—over one hundred and twenty—we see a writer consciously exercising his poetic muse. Obviously Lewis’s determined efforts at publishing poetry throughout this period does not indicate someone who had given up on achieving acclaim as a poet, in spite of the fact many of these were published under “N. W.” Lewis’s Anglo-Saxon shorthand for nat whilk, “[I know] not whom.” One approach to studying these topical poems would be chronological with an eye toward noting Lewis’s continuing maturation as a poet. While there is much to commend this approach, in the end it would be a fragmented, digressive effort. A better approach is thematic since the topical poems largely fall into three major categories: comic and satiric poems, contemplative poems, and religious poems.3

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Lewis’s comic poems mix light-hearted musings with thoughtful reflections. For instance, “Abecedarium Philosophicum,” is nonsense verse and a tour de force. Lewis and Owen Barfield collaborated to write a comic poem in heroic couplets where each line was dedicated to each letter of the alphabet and famous philosophers or philosophical ideas served as the butts of jokes.4 Representative lines include “H is for Hume who awoke Kant from nappin.’ / He said: ‘There’s no causes for things. They just happen’” and “Z? For poor Zeno who often felt faint, / When he heard you deny that Nonentity ain’t.” This gentle parody of philosophy is good fun. “Awake, My Lute” is good-natured playfulness along the lines of “Abecedarium Philosophicum.”5 Utilizing internal rhyme in each odd line and final rhyme in each even line, it appears to be incoherent revelries focusing at first upon a boring lecturer: “I stood in the gloom of a spacious room / Where I listened for hours (on and off ) / To a terrible bore with a beard like a snore / And heavy rectangular cough.” Unlike Dymer, who murders his boring lecturer, the speaker here finds he has a kinship with the lecturer. Indeed, they are shipmates on the Ark: “For the flood had begun and we both had to run / For our place in the queue to the Ark. / Then, I hardly knew how (we were swimming by now), / The seas got all covered with scum.” The poem’s thematic dissonance continues as the speaker imagines himself giving insufficient answers on an Oxford examination: “My answer was Yes. But they marked it N.[on] S.[atis], / And a truffle-fish grabbed at my toe, / And dragged me deep down to a bombulous town / Where the traffic was silent and slow.” The key to this mishmash of ideas is that they are the disconnected fragments of a dream: “Then a voice out of heaven observed, ‘Quarter past seven!’ / And I threw all the waves off my head, / For that voice beyond doubt was the voice of my scout, / And the bed of that sea was my bed.”6 The comedy of the poem is heightened by humorous internal and final rhymes such as off:cough, croup:soup, baboon:the moon, puns:Donne’s, with scum:in -um, and blurbs:verbs. Both “Abecedarium Philosophicum” and “Awake, My Lute” show the influence of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, the most famous practitioners of nonsense verse. For instance, Carroll’s “Examination Statute,” like “Abecedarium Philosophicum,” is a comic poem with lines dedicated to each letter of the alphabet; however, instead of dedicating lines to famous philosophers, Carroll dedicated his to well-known Oxford examiners: “A is for [Acland], who’d physic the Masses, B is for [Brodie], who swears by the gases. / C is for [Conington], constant for Horace. / D is for [Donkin], who integrates for us.”7 In addition, Carroll’s “Ode to Damon” uses internal rhyme and a similar meter of “Awake, My Lute”: “Oh, do not forget the day when we met / At the fruiterer’s shop in the city: / When you said I was plain and excessively

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vain, / “But I knew that meant I was pretty” (emphasis Carroll’s).8 It is not hard to imagine Lewis was influenced in nonsense poems by the work of Carroll. Moving from the nonsensical, we turn to “March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-one Giants,” a poem where Lewis tries to create an apt rhythm for a procession of giants.9 The poem opens with giants stomping along in a parade of pride and pomp: “With stumping stride in pomp and pride / We come to bump and floor ye. / We’ll tramp your ramparts down like hay / And crumple castles into clay.” Throughout the poem Lewis uses internal rhyme, alliteration, monosyllabic words, onomatopoeia, and an iambic meter in order to help us hear this comic procession. Furthermore, this emphasis on sound is reinforced by the progressive refrain at the end of each stanza. Indeed, each refrain (from trumpet, to thunder, to rumble) is accompanied by a musical direction. The trumpet refrain is to employ crescendo (cresc.), indicating a gradual increase in volume; the thunder refrain is to use fortissimo (ff ), indicating it should be the loudest part of the poem; and the rumble refrain is diminuendo (dim.), indicating a softening of the sound. Lewis’s use of these musical notations suggests the poem works like a shaped phrase in music, so that the rise and fall of the sound of music indicates a corresponding rise, climax, and fall in the tension of the poem. This is a comic poem clearly more about sound than meaning. The cumulative effect of these literary and musical devices is percussive, a characteristic shared by many his satiric poems.10 Another percussive comic poem is “The Small Man Orders his Wedding,” given from the perspective of a bridegroom on the occasion of arranging details for his wedding.”11 His is to be an elaborate ceremony primarily characterized by a wide variety of sounds. For instance, he plans to have a nuptial parade of dancing maidens playing tambourines, smartly dressed soldiers, and powerful horses drawing the lovers’ chariot; in addition, bells will be ringing from the belfries and trumpets will be blaring to announce their joy. At the wedding feast itself the boisterous noise of the outer parade will cease, while quieter, gentler sounds of flutes and lutes will serenade his beloved until all withdraw, leaving the two lovers alone, blessed by “Aphrodite’s saffron light, / And Jove’s monarchal presence bright / And Genius burning through the night / The torch of man’s futurity.” The poem ends with the happy couple sinking into “dreaming weariness” while the gods appear to bless their union. Written in the tradition of the epithalamium, this piece joyously celebrates wedded love. Lewis’s satiric poems often confront ideas he found destructive to traditional values and civilized life or they address specific individuals with whom he wishes to cross swords. Occasionally his satire is Horatian—gentle, smiling, and urbane—as in “Coronation March.”12 The coronation of George VI

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(May 12, 1937) is the subject of this slightly irreverent commentary where he suggests the glory and heraldry associated with this event is all that is left of England’s once proud stand on the international stage. Pomposity and pretension mark such elaborate ceremonies now: Bray the trumpet, rumble tragic Drum-beat’s magic, sway the logic Of legs that march a thousand in a uniform, Flags and arches, the lion and the unicorn Romp it, rampant, pompous tramping . . . Some there are that talk of Alexander With a tow-row-row-row-row-row.

The poem’s percussive elements place it in the tradition of “March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-One Giants.” A similar Horatian satire is the lighthearted “Impenitence,” a mock defiance of those who are “too sophisticated” to find in animal stories, including clear references to Homer, E. Nesbit, and Kenneth Grahame, both delightful entertainment and fables of human foibles.13 The opening stanza takes up arms: “All the world’s wiseacres in arms against them / Shan’t detach my heart for a single moment / From the manlike beasts of the earthy stories— / Badger or Moly.” Lewis confesses he is “not so craz’d as to think the creatures” behave as portrayed in such fictions, yet he argues they “all cry out to be used as symbols, / Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature / Formed to reveal us / Each to each, not fiercely but in her gentlest / Vein of household laughter.”14 Lacking a rhyme scheme, the poem achieves its poetic effect through its stanza pattern—each quatrain has three lines with eleven syllables and a final line with five syllables. “An Expostulation (against too many writers of science fiction),” written in tetrameter couplets, is gentle rebuke of science fiction writers who take us to other worlds only to tell the same tired old stories we have on Earth: criminals on the run, conspirators and their schemes, or lovers’ triangles.15 Instead, what Lewis wants is stories that focus on the “otherness” of these other worlds. Why, he asks, should he leave this world for stories unless outside its guarded gates, Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits, Strangeness that moves us more than fear, Beauty that stabs with tingling spear, Or Wonder, laying on one’s heart That finger-tip at which we start As if some thought too swift and shy For reason’s grasp had just gone by?

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In the essay, “On Science Fiction,” he makes the same point: I will now try to divide this species [science fiction] into its sub-species. I shall begin with that sub-species which I think radically bad, in order to get it out of our way. In this sub-species the author leaps forward into an imagined future when planetary, sidereal, or even galactic travel has become common. Against this huge backcloth he then proceeds to develop an ordinary love-story, spy-story, wreck-story, or crimestory. This seems to me tasteless . . . I am . . . condemning not all books which suppose a future widely different from the present, but those which do so without a good reason, which leap a thousand years to find plots and passions which they could have found at home.16

For Lewis a major charm of science fiction was the creation of enchanting other worlds where we can imagine experiencing life differently. “Evolutionary Hymn” is perhaps the funniest of Lewis’s Horatian satires.17 Tongue-in-cheek, this hymn of praise blithely adopts a Darwinian view of the world and assumes the inevitability of human progress: Lead us, Evolution, lead us Up the future’s endless stair: Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us. For stagnation is despair: Groping, guessing, yet progressing, Lead us nobody knows where.

Old static norms of good and evil are to be rejected since new ways and ideas are inherently superior; this notion, what Lewis calls chronological snobbery, is the peculiarly modern notion that the present has more to tell us about the human condition than the past. Thus, “far too long have sages vainly / Glossed great Nature’s simple text; / He who runs can read it plainly, / ‘Goodness = what comes next.’” Darwinian utilitarianism is also celebrated: “By evolving, Life is solving / All the questions we perplexed.” This bit of gentle satire is worth a sing. If Lewis’s Horatian satire is good-natured criticism, his Juvenalian satire is acidic and scathing. For instance, “A Clich´e Came Out of its Cage” is a sharp attack upon moderns who believe they are heralds of a return to the “golden age” of paganism.18 In particular, he mentions F. R. Leavis, whose ideas on literary criticism he disliked, and Bertrand Russell, whose ideas on society, morality, and philosophy he directly opposed: “I saw . . . Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, / leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses / to pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.” In fact, Lewis suggests their “scientific” approaches to literature and social mores show they know little about classical paganism, and that they

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mistake their pale, insipid, godless modern version for the healthy, robust, theistic paganism of old. Lewis’s disregard for these ugly ideas is mirrored in the ugly unrhymed heptameter of the poem. Even more bitter is “Odora Canum Vis (A defence of certain modern biographers and critics).”19 The title comes from Virgil’s Aeneid 4.132 and means “With keen-scented hunting dogs.”20 Biting and barbed, this scathing, ironic defense of writers who churn out works that titillate, glorifying and headlining smut, is an example of what it was like to fall under the wrath of Lewis’s unsheathed critical sword: Come now, don’t be too eager to condemn Our little smut-hounds if they wag their tails (Or shake like jellies as the tails wag them) The moment the least whiff of sex assails Their quivering snouts. Such conduct after all, Though comic, is in them quite natural.

These writers, Lewis continues, who are culturally atrophied, know “neither God, hunger, thought, nor battle, [so] must / Of course hold disproportionate views on lust.” In effect, he gives them over to themselves: “So! Cock your ears, my pretties! Play your part! / The dead are all before you, take your pick. / Fetch! Paid for! Slaver, snuff, defile and lick.” The virulent tone of this poem shows Lewis the public gladiator, eager to slay the dragons of character assassination. “Prelude to Space: An Epithalamium” presents the idea that human exploration of space will be characterized by pride, arrogance, and imperialism; themes Lewis explored as well in the Ransom trilogy. The first stanza is a jingoistic parody: So Man, grown vigorous now, Holds himself ripe to breed, Daily devises how To ejaculate his seed And boldly fertilize The black womb of the unconsenting skies.

Lewis’s frank use of sexual imagery throughout the poem—he refers to a space ship on the launching pad as “the large, / Steel member grow[n] erect”—is intended to communicate his disgust with human imperialism and its “lust to stamp / Our likeness on the abyss.” All humanity can promise space, he says, are “bombs, gallows, Belsen camp, / Pox, polio, Thais’ kiss / Or Judas’”

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and similar catastrophes. The last stanza asks the rhetorical question should humanity celebrate when the first space ships head off to explore space: “Shall we, when the grim shape / Roars upward, dance and sing? / Yes: if we honour rape, / If we take pride to fling / So bountiful on space / The sperm of our long woes, our large disgrace.” This no tender bridal poem celebrating man’s fathering of himself across the universe; instead, it an acrid warning of man’s probable rape of the cosmos. Such bitter irony marks much of Lewis’s writings about space exploration—from the Ransom trilogy to essays like “Religion and Rocketry”—but Lewis is not against progress; instead, he fears the first space explorers will be space exploiters as portrayed so devastatingly in Weston from Perelandra.21 His poem is a caustic caution against space exploration, but it is not a reactionary prohibition. Lewis’s sober cautions about human pillage through space travel was related to his deep distrust of modern life. For instance, “On a Vulgar Error” is a Juvenalian satire on chronological snobbery.22 Lewis begins by admitting that new ideas are not always bad: “Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot / Upon the church? Did anybody say / How modern and how ugly? They did not.” That said, he poses the question: “If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food / All set us hankering after yesterday, / Need this be only an archaising mood?” In reply, he says the answer to this is found in the examples of the man who finds his money drained away by swindlers (he “must compare how he stands with how he stood”) and the man who loses a leg: “If a quack doctor’s breezy ineptitude / Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway / All that I can’t do now, all that I could?” In other words, newness—ideas, fashions, technology, and so on—are not in themselves bad; again, Lewis is no reactionary. The questions that have to be asked, however, are: “How does modernity impact the human condition? Does its manifestations enhance our understanding of who we are, our place in the universe, and our notions of beauty, honor, and virtue? Or does it simply drain away our resources and cut us off at the knees, reducing us to cogs in a mechanistic, naturalistic, meaningless world?” He uses interconnected rhymes in the tercets (aba aba aba cbc cbc cbc) to lead up to his ironic concluding couplet (dd ): “So, when our guides unanimously decry / The backward glance, I think we can guess why.” “Spartan Nactus” is Lewis’s sharpest attack on modern misuse of language, especially modern poetry.23 He feigns being a dunce who cannot understand the subtle nuances of contemporary poetic metaphor and imagery, condemned instead only to have stock responses to the figurative language of the past. Tongue in cheek, Lewis uses couplets, traditional poetic form, and begins with: “I am so coarse, the things the poets see / Are obstinately invisible to me.” This opening serves as his platform from which he attacks modern poetry, particularly T. S. Eliot, and its absurd metaphors: “For twenty years

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I’ve stared my level best / To see if evening—any evening—would suggest / A patient etherized upon a table; / In vain. I simply wasn’t able.” He ends the poem, still tongue in cheek, taking the pose of a foolish, uneducated person (“I am like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom / A primrose was a yellow primrose”) who can only appreciate stock responses, those emotional reactions to ideas, objects, and notions intrinsically connected with the past: [I am] one whose doom Retains him always in the class of dunces, Compelled to offer Stock Responses, Making the poor best that I can Of dull things . . . peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran, Silver streams, cowslip wine, wave on the beach, bright gem, The shape of trees and women, thunder, Troy, Jerusalem.

While not a poetic manifesto, Lewis was clearly throwing down the gauntlet against modern poetry. “Epitaph” is a scathing English sonnet attacking democracy. Lewis suggests democracy’s greatest weakness is the incessant noise its endless discussions and debates cause.24 Using the constant drone of a wireless (radio) as a symbol for democratic clamoring, the speaker would prefer one quiet spot in Hell for a Heaven filled with such “music.” Thus his epitaph: “And therefore, stranger, tiptoe by this grave, / And let posterity record of me, / ‘He died both for, and of, democracy.’”25 “Consolation” is another Juvenalian satire with a political focus. While it ostensibly begins as if celebrating the end of World War II, it concludes with a sharply satirical bite, suggesting postwar England is once again setting on a course of appeasement. This time, however, it is the Soviet Union, not Germany, that is the focus of England’s appeasement.26 The persona is ironically happy, even if “beer is worse and dearer / And milk has got the blues, / Though cash is short and rations / Much shorter than the queues.” In spite of the increase in strikes, crime, and business failures, he says “yet sing like mad that England / Is back to peacetime ways.” What, he says, of “butter, eggs, or mutton, / Freedom or spacious days. / All those were non-essentials.” The surest test of peace is this: “If we thus caress the Muscovite, / England has turned to rest.” The last stanza of the poem uses a historical allusion to further its satire: To ease my doubts Appeasement Returns. Peace must be here! The tune of glorious Munich Once more salutes my ear;

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An ancient British melody— We heard it first begin At the court of shifty Vortigern Who let the Heathen in.

Lewis mocks those concessions made to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II as Europe was divided among the Allied forces. To him they sound like the same tune played when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich and acquiesced to Hitler in 1939, believing such appeasement would prevent large-scale conflict. In fact, such appeasement, he says, is “an ancient British melody,” first evident in the actions of Vortigern whose commitment to compromise led to the destruction of his empire by the Saxon invaders he thought he could appease.27 Lewis’s comic and satiric verse is not Lewis’s best poetry. While his exuberant playfulness with meter and sound in the comic pieces is engaging, the nonsense verse is second-rate. On the other hand, when he turns to satire he is querulous, pedantic, and brittle. The percussive characteristics of the comic and satiric poetry, while sometimes effective in creating rhythm and cadence, more often than not lead to poor, “creaky” verse. It is hard to take these poems seriously because they are either inane or venomous; in neither instance do we find the subtle beauty and powerful nuance of language illustrated in his more effective poems. Lewis achieved greater success when he turned contemplative verse. Lewis’s contemplative poems are reflective pieces denoting personal and public concerns he felt compelled to consider in verse. In general, Lewis wrote contemplative poems that fall into two broad categories. The first group consists of poems that deal with the shallowness of modern life. By and large these poems muse upon the vacuity of life in large cities, the destructive encroachment of civilization on the English countryside, and the deconstruction of language, meaning, and objective truth. The second group consists of poems that reflect upon the human condition and focus upon both the positive and negative realities of existence. Accordingly, he wrote poems on the one hand dealing with joy and on the other hand dealing with uncertainty, obsessive love, despair, loss, and death. If the poems dealing with the shallowness of modern life may be thought of as public analysis and social criticism, those dealing with the human condition may be thought of as personal reflections and private ruminations. In “Finchley Avenue,” Lewis reflects at length upon the quiet unease he connects with those who live in large English cities like London.28 Although the poem, written in alexandrine couplets, begins “we are proud of Finchley Avenue” and goes on to chronicle its attributes—its quietness, good views of London, copper beeches, beautiful stands of laurel and rhododendron, banks

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of lush grass, finely manicured driveways, and stately homes—we sense a hollowness and emptiness in such streets. The Tudor homes, once a symbol of bourgeois success, are now ironic commentaries on the vacuity of modern life. The only laudatory aspects of the homes are the gardens: “That garden lawn / Is the primordial fountain out of which was drawn / All you have since imagined of the lawn where stood / Eve’s apple tree, or of the lands before the flood.” Nostalgia is also captured: In that suburban attic with its gurgling sound Of water pipes, in such a quiet house, you found In early days the relics of still earlier days, Forgotten trumpery worn to act forgotten plays, Old books, then first remembered, calling up the past Which then, as now, was infinitely sweet and vast. There first you felt the wonder of deep time, the joy And dread of Schliemann standing on the grave of Troy.29

Human activity on the avenue is limited to the rush of the owners of the houses to get to work and tradesmen making their daily rounds; by one o’clock in the afternoon the street sinks “to the dead silence of the afternoon.” Lewis emphasizes the loneliness of such streets: No countryside can offer so much solitude. I have known the world less lonely in a winter wood, For there you hear the striking of a village clock Each hour, or the faint crowing of a distant cock. But here is nothing. Nobody goes past. No feet But mine. I doubt if anyone has used this seat, Here in the shade, save only me. And here I sit And drink the unbroken silence and reflect on it.

The poem concludes with the speaker wondering about the families living in these homes. He assumes most of the children are grown and gone, leaving for the most part only the wives of the men who own the homes: “The whole long avenue exhales the sense / Of absent husbands, housework done, uncharted hours.”30 He wonders if this gives the wives “painful emptiness” or “a blessed state / Of truancy wherein they darkly celebrate / Rites of some Bona Dea which no man may see?” Regardless, while he affirms the wives of this street may be virtuous, he feels it is “an eerie rashness to possess a wife / And house that go on living with their different life, / For ever inaccessible to us, all day.” The last lines reflect a final musing: “For as we knew in childhood, if the fathers stay / At home by chance, that whole day takes a different tone, / Better,

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or worse, it may be; but unlike its own.” The poem suggests suburban life serves to drive apart a husband and a wife—he to a life of work and activity outside the home and she to a dull if settled life of housework. For neither is there vital, meaningful living. This sober meditation on the shallowness of modern life may not be his best poetry, but it reveals his concern with the social constructs of his day that he found disturbing. “The Future of Forestry” extended his social critique of contemporary life beyond the limits of the modern city; the concern in this is the encroachment of the modern world upon the English countryside.31 The poem, written in blank verse, asks, when all the trees are gone, sacrificed to roads and shops, who will tell the children what trees were: “‘What was a chestnut? / Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk? / Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is. / What was Autumn? They never taught us.’” He insists some remnants of the existence of trees will be passed down, of “creatures of lower nature / Able to live and die, though neither / Beast nor man.” Actually he extends the poem beyond the natural world to include questionings about the “future” of faery, returning to central themes of Spirits in Bondage (hereafter SB) and “The Queen of Drum.” For instance, rumors of “trees as men walking,” goblins, and the pale faces of birch girls will never cease: “So shall a homeless time, though dimly / Catch from afar (for soul is watchful) / A sight of tree-delighted Eden.”32 For Lewis there is always more to reality than just the natural world; faery is always there, hidden only by the veil of our own blindness. “The Country of the Blind” shifts Lewis’s concern about the shallowness of modernity to the disconnect between language and meaning.33 He pictures a race of people who think they can see, but who are actually blind: “Hard light bathed them—a whole nation of eyeless men, / Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed.” While the disconnect between language and meaning has occurred gradually, moderns are now blind to what words really mean: “Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their / Great grandsires, unabashed, talking of light [Lewis’s emphasis] in some / Eunuch’d, etiolated, / Fungoid sense, as a symbol of / Abstract thoughts.” As a result of this, no objective truth can be conveyed through words: If a man, one that had eyes, a poor Misfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or greenSloped sea waves, or admired how Warm tints change in a lady’s cheek, None complained he had used words from an alien tongue, None question’d. It was worse. All would agree. “Of course,” Came their answer. “We’ve all felt Just like that.”

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Such mawkish woolly headedness, has resulted in jargon: “The words— / Sold, raped, flung to the dogs—now could avail no more; / Hence silence. But the mould warps, / With glib confidence, easily / Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set / Fools concocting a myth, taking words for things.” To prove his point, he invites readers to speak with others about the old, vital truths: “Attempt speech on the truths that once, / Opaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable, / Dread but dear as a mountain- / Mass, stood plain to the inward eye.” Sadly, Lewis intimates, all one will receive in response is the blank stare of the blind. Philosophically, this is one of Lewis’s most profound poems, a thoughtful antidote to attempts to strip meaning from language.34 “Re-Adjustment” amplifies Lewis’s concern that modern man has lost the ability to connect words with meaning.35 The poem, an unrhymed “sonnet,” begins with the speaker confessing he had hoped old age would bring comfort: “I thought there would be a grave beauty, a sunset splendour / In being the last of one’s kind: a topmost moment as one watched / The huge wave curving over Atlantis, the shrouded barge / Turning away with wounded Arthur, or Ilium burning.” This persona is an example of what Lewis terms Old Western Man in his inaugural address De Descriptione Temporum delivered upon his assuming the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English literature at Cambridge in 1954, and this poem has obvious affinities with the address.36 The speaker says he had assumed the next generation would look on the cultural accomplishments of the past with gratitude, gentleness, and understanding. However, he realizes this will not be, since language and meaning are under attack: “Between the new Hominidae and us who are dying, already / There rises a barrier across which no voice can ever carry, / For devils are unmaking language.” The next generation has cut itself off from the old core values of civilized life, desiring instead to find purpose and direction in modernity: “Uproot your loves, one by one, with care, from the future, / And trusting to no future, receive the massive thrust / And surge of the many-dimensional timeless rays converging / On this small, significant dew drop, the present that mirrors all.”37 This ironic conclusion suggests not only his own “re-adjustment” but also one many will have to make because of the future that will result from the current modernity. Although Lewis never lived to encounter deconstruction as a literary theory, his poem anticipates its approach to language and the possibility (or impossibility) of meaning. Lewis’s contemplative poems musing on the human condition are among his best. “Sweet Desire” is about joy from the perspective of one who has been so often disappointed in experiencing joy that he is tentative, even fearful, about giving himself over completely to the pursuit of joy.38 In alliterative half-lines recalling Anglo-Saxon verse, a the speaker addresses God and says he is being haunted by faint hints of “sweet stabbing” joy “coming from your

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country” reminding him of past experiences.39 This disturbs him, and he compares himself to a man in a dungeon who has heard in past “the hinge on the hook turning / Often. Always that opened door / Let new tormentors in.” As the door to joy appears to be opening again, he, like a jaded prisoner, retreats into a corner of his cell rather than risk a disappointing attempt at escape: “So, fearing, I / Taste not but with trembling. I was tricked before.”40 In his past disappointments with joy, he has mistaken imitations of joy for the real thing, and so he is wary of yet another cheat. But he cannot resist: But what’s the use? For yield I must Though long delayed, at last must dare To give over, to be eased of my iron casing, Molten at thy melody, as men of snow In the solar smile. Slow-paced I come, Yielding by inches. And yet, oh Lord, and yet, —Oh Lord, let not likeness fool me again.

This alliterative admission exposes the speaker’s passion for joy and reflects Lewis’s own persistent pursuit of joy.41 “The Day with the White Mark” suggests how joy comes unexpected, unexplained, and unsolicited.42 In a boisterous opening, we find that joy invades every action of the speaker’s day: “All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness.” Oddly, however, the speaker’s reality shouts that all is bleak and grim: “Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season. / It was too; all ahead is dark or splashed with hideous light. / My garden’s spoiled; my holidays are cancelled; the omens harden; / The plann’d and the unplann’d miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.” But joy sweeps reason aside so that he “could have kissed the very scullery taps.” He says “the colour of / My day was like a peacock’s chest.” Joy washes reason away: In at each sense there stole Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul. As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there, And glimmering roots were visibly at work below one’s feet, So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard, Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat, Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible Longings, the ice-keen joys that shook my body and turned me pale.

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The unpredictability of joy leads him to wonder “who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?”43 He ends by noting joy is never predictable: “I question if the angel himself / Has power to choose when sudden heaven for me begins or ends.” Lewis’s “sudden heaven” recalls his affirmation in Surprised by Joy (hereafter SJ ) that joy cannot be actively sought: Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else—whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard—does the “thrill” arise. It is a by-product. Its very existence presupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer. . . . Often I frightened it away by my greedy impatience to snare it, and, even when it came, instantly destroyed it by introspection, and at all times vulgarized it by my false assumption about its nature.44

“The Day with the White Mark,” published six years before Surprised by Joy, affirms how it is that joy comes as a surprise in the human experience. While Lewis’s contemplative poems on joy are primarily positive, his reflections upon other sobering issues that confront humanity tend to be introspective, often communicating an uncertain, tentative perspective about the human condition. For instance, “Essence” initially published anonymously from the anthology Fear No More: A Book of Poems for the Present Time by Living English Poets is very introspective.45 It is an internal musing on thought and will and their relationship to the essence of self.46 While the speaker frankly admits his reluctance to speak about the inner world (“Thoughts that go through my mind, / I dare not tell them”), he rejects the bifurcation of SB. Instead, he seeks an integration of thought and will in defining the essence of self: “That essence must have been / Which still I call / My self, since— thus unclean— / It dies not at all.” “Pilgrim’s Problem” continues this kind of introspection, and its conclusions are tentative as well since it challenges the notion age brings wisdom and settled peace.47 A walker, late in the day, relies on his map and assumes he is nearing a restful end to his journey. The poem becomes symbolic when we read of how he looks forward to charity, humility, contemplation, fortitude, temperance, and chastity. In fact, he realizes none of these: “I can see nothing like all this.” He wonders rhetorically is it the map or him that is flawed: “Maps can be wrong. But the experienced walker knows / That the other explanation is more often true.”48 Ironically, he implies it must be him rather than the map that is flawed. Perhaps the most disturbing poem questioning the significance of the human condition is “The Salamander.”49 Sitting before a fire, the speaker gazes mindlessly into burning coals where “blue waves / Of shuddering heat . . . r[i]se and f[a]ll, / And blazing ships and blinding caves, / Canyons and streets and hills of hell.” However, this familiar atmosphere is suddenly changed, when “amidst it all / I saw a living creature crawl.” From this point

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on the fiery salamander gives a soliloquy about what he “sees” outside the fire; his melancholic reflections are compared to ones men make since he looks with “sad eyes . . . as men [look] out upon the skies.” Gazing into the dark room, the salamander says, “this is the end,” the place “where all life dies,” the universe of “blank silence, distances untold / Of unimaginable cold.” The lights from the room he can see only dimly, since they “are but reflections cast from here, / There is no other fire but this. / This speck of life, this fading spark / Existed amid the boundless dark.” The creature intimates, therefore, that the real world, the world of meaning is found only within the fire; outside there is isolation, estrangement, and alienation.50 Because he can only see what is physically in front of him, the only world he is willing to accept is the tangible one. That there could be an invisible or spiritual realm beyond his fiery world is unthinkable. And, of course, by implication mankind has a similar mindset; rather than face boldly the prospect of another dimension, we, like the salamander, deny anything we cannot perceive as a part of the material world about us. He ends with a nihilistic credo, one suggesting even values are hollow: Blind Nature’s measureless rebuke To all we value, I received Long since (though wishes bait the hook With tales our ancestors believed) And now can face with fearless eye Negation’s final sovereignty.

Yet, he confronts such nihilism courageously “with fearless eye, / Negation’s final sovereignty.” The salamander’s affirmation of nihilism implies, if we make the invited comparison between the salamander and the human condition, that men often make a similar discovery and affirmation about their own existence. Life may be without meaning, yet man’s task is to face that reality courageously. This is a very different voice of Lewis, a distant voice, contrasting dramatically with the confident, buoyant voice of so much of his prose.51 A variation on this distant voice occurs in “Infatuation,” unique for Lewis since it considers the obsessive nature of romantic love.52 One of Lewis’s longest poems, it is a poignant internal monologue a man has concerning both the character of the woman he loves and his inability to control his thoughts about her. His dilemma is expressed succinctly in the opening lines: “Body and soul most fit for love can best / Withstand it. I am ill, and cannot rest, / Therefore I’m caught.” Echoing themes from Shakespeare’s sonnets, Lewis expands the analogy between sickness and love53 : “Disease is amorous, health / At love’s door has the pass both in and out.” Most frustrating to the persona is his complete incapacity to block her out of his

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mind. When he strains with every fiber to keep her out, “then in she comes by stealth.” This is compounded by the fact she is not worth his obsession: “Her brain’s a bubble, / Her soul, a traveller’s tale.” Yet time and again she “comes between / My thoughts and me.” He tries to force himself to read a book, but this does not help. In fact, it drives him to delve ever deeper into his soul in an effort to understand his obsession. He confesses, “I do not love her, like her, wish her well,” yet he says he is not driven by lust either. As he reflects back over their relationship, he realizes he has fallen in love with the idea of love: She stood, an image lost as soon as seen, Like beauty in a vision half-caught between Two aimless and long-lumbering dreams of night. The thing I seek for was not anywhere At any time on earth.

Sadly, when he finds she cannot live up to his idea of love, he finds himself still driven to want her; the visceral rules the cerebral. Consequently, he considers trying to teach her love through an exercise of charity toward her, but he knows this will not work: “She can never learn; / And what am I, whose voice should wake the dead?” Such honest self-revelation on his part saves the poem from being self-righteous invective. As he analyzes her character more, he notes she is really a product of what she thinks men want, and she is ever ready to play “the rapt disciple,” to flatter whichever man she happens to be with at the moment. She is beautiful on the outside, but empty on the inside: Her holiest moods are gaudy desecrations Of poor half holy things: her exaltations Are frothed from music, moonlight, wine and dances; Love is to her a dream of bridal dresses, Friendship, a tittering hour of girl’s caresses, Virtue, a steady purpose to advance, Honoured, and safe, by the well-proven roads, No loophole left to passion or to chance.

Recalling a party they attended together the previous evening, he remembers how he longed to tell her the truth about herself. But she, enjoying her triumph as men buzzed about her and other women envied her, would never have listened. Even he was momentarily deflected from his purpose: “Could she have looked so noble, and no seed / Of spirit in her at all?” Eventually,

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however, he knows “Venus infernal taught such voice and eyes / To bear themselves abroad for merchandise.”54 The poem ends with him, in spite of his obsession with her, being relieved that “she’d never have me,” for he imagines how awful a life with her would be. Yet in his obsession he believes he learns something about the human condition: “For each one of us, down below / The caldron brews in the dark. We do not know / By whom, or on what fields, we are reined and ridden. / There are not acts; spectators of ourselves / We wait and watch the event, the cause hidden.” Whatever confidence we might have in ourselves, our good name, our native abilities, and so on is vanity. The truth is darker: “The motion / That moves us is not ours, but in the ocean / Of hunger and bleak fear, like buoys we ride, / And seem to move ourselves, and in the waves / Lifting and falling take our shame and pride.” The speaker ends by affirming the essential impotence of human intention. Even if we think we have some ability to control our fortunes, the truth is we ride upon the waves of time and providence, and like buoys we ride rather than direct our destinies. “Infatuation” is among Lewis’s most mature pieces of writing as he dealt frankly and openly with the subtleties of the human obsession. Indeed, Lewis managed a poem that well illustrates the eternal war between the mind and the will, the spirit and the flesh, reason and passion. Avoiding “pat” answers about the human experience, Lewis demonstrated here a mind fully awake to the danger of human choice and will. “Reason” continues Lewis’s focus upon the human condition and the inner conflicts noted above in “Infatuation.”55 This time, however, the conflict is between reason and the imagination.56 He personifies reason as “a virgin, arm’d, commercing with celestial light” and claims the absolute necessity of joining with her. Yet he equally argues the necessity of uniting with imagination, “warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night.” The poem turns upon discovering some way to reconcile these two and “make imagination’s dim exploring touch / Ever report the same as intellectual sight.” If he can ever discover a way to bring these two together, “then could I truly say, and not deceive, / Then wholly say, that I BELIEVE” (Lewis’s emphasis). The poem itself never achieves such reconciliation, but instead reveals how important these two concepts are to Lewis’s creative and intellectual process. Perhaps the most impressive work where Lewis achieves such reconciliation is Perelandra. There we see both his rich and powerfully evocative imagination illustrated in his lush physical descriptions of that world as well as the dialectic of reason in the lengthy, closely argued debate between the Green Lady, Weston, and Ransom. Not surprisingly, among the most moving of Lewis’s poems dealing with the human condition are those considering loss and death. For instance, one of Lewis’s most poignant treatments of death appears in “On the Death of Charles Williams.” This poem records the shock of losing a friend and how it

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throws one’s mistaken view of the human condition into a tailspin: “I can’t see the old contours; the slant alters. It’s a bolder world / Than I once thought. I wince, caught in the shrill winds that dance on this ridge. / Is it the first sting of a world’s waning, the great Winter? Or the cold of Spring?”57 The old comfortable thought that human life had meaning is challenged by death. Indeed, the knowledge that life is fragile causes him to “wince” and question whether or not such a loss is just the tip of the iceberg. Although he allows that he may be overreacting, he never answers the question, and we are left with the impression that the loss of a friend challenges wellworn assurances about life having ultimate meaning and purpose. Ironically, Lewis notes that it would only be with Williams that he could hope to talk through and make sense of this death: “I have lost now the one only friend wise enough to advise, / To touch deftly such problems. I am left asking. Concerning your death / With what friend now would it help much to spend words, unless it were you?” Like other poems Lewis wrote lamenting the loss of friends, this poignant piece indicates the presence of the distant voice of dissonance and disorientation. While “Lines Written in a Copy of Milton’s Works” hints subtly at Lewis’s literary indebtedness to both Marvell and Milton, the poem concerns the personal isolation one feels as the result of lost friendship.58 It begins with a persona noting how natural creatures blithely carry on in harmony with one another: “Alas, the happy beasts at pasture play / All, all alike; all of one mind are they.” Not only are the animals in harmony, but also they easily change companions and are blessed with disinterested friendship: “None loves a special friend beyond the rest.” Indeed, even if a sparrow loses a friend to a bird of prey or to a hunter’s arrow, “with a new friend next day, content, he wings his flight.” The persona then contrasts this Wordsworthian ethos with the dissonant relationships between human beings. Man, the persona suggests, cannot unthinkingly and casually find the easy friend since he “in his fellows finds / (Hard fate) discordant souls and alien minds!” Actually, in the effort to find even one close friend, “one heart amidst a thousand like his own,” he will encounter a good deal of difficulty. And, ironically, even if he does eventually find such a friend, it will only be temporary: Or if, at last relenting, fate shall send In answer to his prayer, the authentic friend, Him in some unsuspected hour, some day He never dreaded, Death will snatch away And leave behind a loss that time can ne’er allay.

Once bereft of that friend, he is left without a companion to “charm to rest each eating care,” to share “the secrets of my bosom,” or to “while away with

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delight / Of his discourse the livelong winter night.” The last stanza begins with an emphasis upon the persona’s sense of isolation: “Alone I walk the fields and plains, alone / The dark vales with dense branches overgrown.” In his solitude he feels confined and aimless. In addition, the imagery of the last two lines of the poem indicate an overwhelming sense of estrangement: “Here, as day fades, I wait, and all around / I hear the rain that falls with sullen sound.” The cold dampness of the fading day suggests a pathetic fallacy, especially as the rain falls with “sullen sound.” The melancholy tone of this poem links it with “To G. M.” and “On the Death of Charles Williams.” The final three poems are deeply emotional sonnets concentrating upon loss.59 “Joys that Sting” is almost certainly a melancholic reverie about a terminated romantic friendship.60 The persona is saddened “to take the old walks alone, or not at all, / To order one pint where I ordered two, / To think of, and then not to make, the small / Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you).” That he now only orders “one pint where I ordered two,” indicates an erotic if not marital connection since two male friends would probably have ordered separately; on the other hand, a husband would normally order for his wife.61 He goes on to underscore his estrangement and comments that his life is now little more than show: To laugh (oh, one’ll laugh), to talk upon Themes that we talked upon when you were there, To make some poor pretence of going on, Be kind to one’s old friends, and seem to care, While no one (O God) through the years will say The simplest, common word in just your way.

The grief this poem expresses over the loss of the beloved is both simple and profound: “it is the joys once shared that have the stings.” “Old Poets Remembered” is more about suffering than lost friendship, although the speaker clearly senses impending loss.62 As he watches his friend suffer with dignity, he is initially buoyed, yet when he sees his friend’s pain, “down through a waste world of slag and sewers / And hammering and loud wheels once more I go.” The only hint the friend might be a woman occurs in the third stanza: “Thus, what old poets told me about love / (Tristram’s obedience, Isoud’s sovereignty . . . ) / Turns true in a dread mode I dreamed not of, / What once I studied, now I learn to be.” Lewis, the scholar who writes The Allegory of Love, a scholastic treatise on medieval courtly love, communicates in this poem something of the emptiness of academic knowledge about romantic love when compared to the actual experience of love, especially when the beloved is suffering painfully.

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The third poem, “As the Ruin Falls” is actually about the anticipated loss of Eros.63 In the poem the persona rebukes himself with bitter honesty: “All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you. / I never had a selfless thought since I was born. / I am mercenary and selfseeking through and through: / I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.” His confession about his egocentricity continues as he admits that he “cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin”; he has spoken of love in the past, but he recognizes that his has not been a giving love: “self-imprisoned, [I] always end where I begin.” The beloved, however, has taught the persona by example both what loving means (giving) and how his has been self-centered: “Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.” But there is an added dimension; the beloved appears to be leaving him, whether because of circumstance or death we cannot be sure: “I see the chasm. And everything you are making / My heart into a bridge by which I might get back / From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.” To the beloved he credits his own faltering steps toward a love that is giving; indeed, the beloved has given him the capacity to be less selfish—she has made his heart a bridge—and less isolated— she has helped to end his “exile, and grow man.” His comment that the bridge is now breaking almost certainly refers to his anticipated loss of her. And so he blesses her: “For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains / You give me are more precious than all other gains.” Given the intensely emotional nature of these last three poems, it is not surprising that some critics have assumed they deal explicitly with Lewis’s relationship with Joy Davidman.64 Because all three poems exist only in holographs and are not dated, there is no way to establish definitively this connection. Regardless, they are powerful witnesses of Lewis’s ability to mine the depths of the human condition. Lewis’s contemplative poems illustrate deep and seasoned reflection. While the ones concerned with the shallowness of modern life tend to be public, perhaps even being offered as social criticism, they lack the biting, acerbic tone of his satirical poems; instead they are measured soundings illustrating a profoundly nostalgic sensibility. In most cases they lament the erosion of core values important to civilized life. Tracing these values back to the Greek and Roman writers he so admired—Homer, Virgil, and Ovid—as well as the towering figures of western literature—Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Yeats—Lewis’s contemplative poems are framed by his conviction that honor, courage, bravery, honesty, charity, respect, and related values infuse human existence with purpose and meaning. At the same time, his contemplative poems considering the commonalties of human existence—doubt, obsession, loss, death, and grief—offer compelling evidence that he was fully human. While the tone of these poems may

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disturb some who believe Lewis was always the confident, buoyant Christian apologist, they actually make his corpus complete. That Lewis endured the same shifting sand of life, not glibly dismissing it, makes his work “ring” true. His contemplative poems lead naturally to his religious verse, perhaps the finest body of poetry he produced. Lewis’s religious poems focus upon the character of God; biblical themes, events, or motifs; and the Christian life, including prayer, the nature of love, joy in Christ, spiritual pride, the incarnation, the resurrection, angels, thanksgiving, grief, doubt, heaven, hell, and temptation.65 A thematic survey of Lewis’s religious verse first notes his youthful, jaundiced perception of God as found in Spirits in Bondage where he portrays God as cruel and malicious. However, a radical shift in his understanding of God is revealed in the poetry of The Pilgrim’s Regress; these poems reflect Lewis’s conversion to Christ and his initial growth as a believer.66 Later religious poems offer mature ruminations on life in Christ. In total, Lewis’s religious verse provides us valuable insights into his efficacy as a communicator of Christian truth while powerfully supplementing his work as a prose apologist. By the time Lewis published The Pilgrim’s Regress (hereafter PR) in 1933, fourteen years after SB and two years after his conversion to Christ, his view of God had undergone profound changes. He no longer viewed God as malicious, arbitrary, and cruel, and many passages in SJ chronicle this change. The culmination of Lewis’s evolving view of God is revealed where he writes of his conversion from atheism to theism, perhaps the most quoted portion of SJ: You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.67

Not surprisingly, his religious verse reflects these views. PR contains sixteen poems that focus primarily upon the spiritual life; as a group they rank among the best of Lewis’s poems, perhaps in part because they so intimately and immediately reflect aspects of Lewis’s new life in Christ.68

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The first poem, “He Whom I Bow To” (pp. 144–145),69 sonnet-like although written in alexandrine couplets, does not appear until three-quarters of the way through PR. This late appearance suggests that as John, the hero of PR, awakens to the beauty of poetry, he correspondingly awakens to the truth of his broken spiritual condition and need for God’s grace.70 The speaker confesses that language used to address God is so inadequate “prayers always, taken at their word, blaspheme” and “all men are idolaters, crying unheard / To senseless idols, if thou take them at their word.” Accordingly, anticipating the later “Legion,” the poem ends with the prayer “take not, oh Lord, our literal sense, but in thy great, / Unbroken speech our halting metaphor translate.” Among the most powerful poems in PR is “You Rest Upon Me All My Days” (pp. 147–148),71 reflecting a tone similar to poems in SB, which confront the cruel, malicious God; the difference here is that God, while demanding and jealous, loves rather than hates the speaker. The speaker grapples with a fierce omnipotence, much as a dog strains at the leash of an unyielding master. He feels like a person trapped in a burning desert bathed by unrelenting, suffocating, light and heat. God, like the sun, is the “inevitable Eye” that confines a desert traveler in smothering tents and “hammers the rocks with light.” He is an unyielding, unrelenting, and uncompromising force. In desperation the speaker longs for “one cool breath in seven / One air from northern climes / The changing and the castleclouded heaven / Of my old Pagan times.” It is difficult not to slip into the “personal heresy” and to read these lines as recalling Lewis’s affection for Norse myth and literature in terms of both its religious and metaphorical influences on his youth and young adulthood. Regardless, these lines suggest a powerful longing for freedom from the “heat” of God’s eye; he is ready to retreat from the demands of an unyielding God toward the comfortable fastness of his pagan days. Such an option, however, is denied him: “But you have seized all in your rage / Of Oneness. Round about /Beating my wings, all ways, within your cage, / I flutter, but not out.” Here a God is pictured as possessive, jealous, and demanding, and the speaker pictures himself as a bird trapped in a cage, straining earnestly though vainly to wing his way out. The poem leaves two distinct impressions. The first is of a “convert” who yearns for his preconversion days where, rightly or wrongly, he believes life held more freedom, more satisfaction. Indeed, the tone is similar to George Herbert’s “The Collar” where the speaker advises himself to “leave thy cold dispute / Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, / Thy ropes of sands, / Which petty thoughts have made.” As in Herbert’s poem, Lewis’s speaker is frustrated (“beating my wings”) yet thwarted (“I flutter, but not out”). The second is that God is an all encompassing, smothering, demanding deity, uncompromising in His jealous possession of a follower. Such a God seizes “all in [His] rage / Of

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Oneness.” These impressions combine to highlight the speaker in “You Rest Upon Me All My Days” as one who regards with nostalgia his preconversion lifestyle, yet he also has grudging appreciation for this jealous God. He senses it is now Yahweh, not Odin that he serves. Since “You Rest Upon Me All My Days” largely resolves the question of God’s real character, Lewis’s religious verse in PR turns to consider what it means to live as a Christian. For example, “My Heart Is Empty” (p. 162),72 with its alternating alexandrines and trimeters examines the contradiction between living the expected “abundant life” and the cold reality of spiritual torpor. It is a candid admission the speaker’s spiritual life is a dry, arid wasteland: “All the fountains that should run / With longing, are in me / Dried up. In all my countryside there is not one / That drips to find the sea.” What is worse, he has no desire to experience God’s love, except as it serves to lessen his own pain. Yet the speaker avoids despair by calling out to the one “who didst take / All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb.” The vigor of his faith in Christ is seen in his belief that if God will intervene in his own Lazarus-like life, he may survive for later rebirth, much as a seed “which grows / Through winter ripe for birth.” Just as the dormant seed avoids the chilling winter wind, so he will endure this winter of his life: “Because, while it forgets, the heaven remembering throws / Sweet influence still on earth, / —Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes / Still turning round the earth.” The pleading tone of Lewis’s poem is similar to many of Herbert’s. For instance, “Dullness” from The Temple begins “Why do I languish thus, drooping and dull, / As if I were all earth? / O give me quickness, that I may with mirth / Praise the brim-full!”73 The next three poems in PR anticipate material Lewis returns to The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. The rhyming alexandrines of “Thou Only Art Alternative to God” (p. 177)74 baldly posit we either serve God or Satan; there is no other choice: “God is: thou art: / The rest illusion.” The speaker notes he can either serve the pure “white light without flame” of God or the “infernal starving in the strength of fire” of Satan. It ends with the speaker noting fearfully: “Lord, open not too often my weak eyes to this!” The poem’s portrayal of a malicious Satan borrows heavily from “Satan Speaks” (I) and “Satan Speaks” (XIII) of Spirits in Bondage. In addition, this poem contains the kernel of Screwtape’s counsel to Wormword about keeping his patient from engaging in dialectic thinking, encouraging him instead to promote muddle-headedness and hazy logic. The focus upon Hell continues in Lewis’s triolet “God in His Mercy” (p. 180),75 a terse, pithy, epigrammatic observation about why God created Hell. Framed around the refrain “God in his mercy made / The fixed pains of Hell,” the poem says God actually limits misery by creating Hell as a fixed area for the suffering of those within. That

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is, God’s creation of Hell is not cruel, but merciful, since God limits the place and thus the extent of suffering for those who reject him. He could have just as easily permitted Hell to be boundless, limitless, and formless. By carving out a limited sphere for those who choose Hell, God is being kind, echoing the line from SJ, “the hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man.”76 In the third poem about Hell, “Nearly They Stood Who Fall” (pp. 181– 182),77 Lewis, reflecting the pervasive influence of Milton, considers both the angels who fell and those who did not. He imagines those who fell, looking back and seeing “the one false step” they took and realizing the “lightest swerve / Of foot not yet enslaved” could have meant they “might have been saved.” However, such insight is not limited to the fallen angels, since Lewis notes the unfallen angels know similarly how easily they could have fallen, “and with cold after fear / Look back to mark how near / They grazed the Sirens’ land / . . . The choice of ways so small, the event so great.” The poem ends by forcing men to consider how angelic examples speak to us, warning us of “the road that seems so clear” and reminding us “which, being once crossed forever unawares, / Denies return.” Almost certainly Lewis had in mind Satan’s speech at the beginning of Book IV of PL where he says: Oh had his powerful Destiny ordain’d Me some inferior Angel, I had stood Then happy; no unbounded hope had rais’d Ambition. Yet why not? some other Power As great might have aspir’d, and me though mean Drawn to his part; but other Powers as great Fell not, but stand unshak’n, from within Or from without, to all temptations arm’d. Hadst thou the same free Will and Power to stand? Thou hadst.78

Playing off Satan’s realization that he could have chosen not to fall, Lewis affirms in “Nearly They Stood Who Fall” that human choices and their consequences are critically important; they are deadly serious and connect us to a spiritual reality that exists whether we recognize it or not. The three poems on hell in PR are sober reflections on the nature of man’s spiritual adversary, the extent of God’s mercy, and the spiritual significance of human responsibility. The next two poems concern spiritual pride, what Lewis calls the “great” sin in Mere Christianity, and already noted as something he struggled with throughout his life.79 The first poem, “I Have Scraped Clean the Plateau” (p. 183),80 centers its alexandrines on the ugliness of self-righteous pride. The female persona, echoing the autonomy of Dymer, rejects both the earth—it

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is filthy, unchaste, a “sluttish helot”—and man—”filthy flesh,” embracing instead a hard, flinty, asceticism: “I have made my soul (once filthy) a hard, pure, bright / Mirror of steel . . . / I have a mineral soul.” Her rejection and isolation are attempts to live only for self, unsullied by aspects of human life that might shake her belief in her own superiority: “So I, borrowing nothing and repaying / Nothing, neither growing nor decaying, / Myself am to myself, a mortal God, a self-contained / Unwindowed monad, unindebted and unstained.” These lines anticipate Orual’s self-righteousness and selfsufficiency through Part I of Till We Have Faces and the initial self-absorbed pride of Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength. “Because of Endless Pride” (pp. 184–185),81 treats spiritual pride from an opposite perspective as the persona recognizes that in every hour of his life he looks “upon my secret mirror / Trying all postures there / To make my image fair.”82 Instead of delighting in the luscious, rich grapes God gives him for nourishment, he admires the “white hand” holding them. Though he catches himself admiring himself in the mirror of his soul, he is sensitive enough to know “who made the glass, whose light makes dark, whose fair / Makes foul, my shadowy form reflected there / That Self-Love, brought to bed of Love may die and bear / Her sweet son in despair.” The answer to spiritual pride, therefore, is humility, and recognizing it is God, not self, who rules human life and the natural world. Lewis may have been influenced in part by Herbert’s “The Bunch of Grapes” that ends: But can he want the grape, who hath the wine? I have their fruit and more. Blessed be God, who prosper’d Noah’s vine, And made it bring forth grapes good store. But much more him I must adore, Who of the laws sowre juice sweet wine did make, Ev’n God himself, being pressed for my sake.83

Moving from poems focusing upon spiritual pride, “Iron Will Eat the World’s Old Beauty Up” (p. 187)84 is a direct commentary on the modern world as Lewis sees it, employing themes from SB and echoing his distrust of human progress when it occurs at the expense of beauty and truth. He imagines the industrial revolution, particularly the new machines of his own day, involved in the destruction of nature; as the new cities and buildings emerge (the “iron forests”), they will block out nature so there will be “no green or growth.” In addition, the growing popularity of sensational journalism—“the printing presses with their clapping wings”—shall drown out the wisdom of the past: “Harpy wings, / Filling your minds all day with foolish things, / Will

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tame the eagle Thought: till she sings / Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.”85 The poem also reflects Lewis’s disgust with chronological snobbery by parodying it in the last stanza: “The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, / And fools crying, Because it has begun / It will continue as it has begun!” Indeed the inevitably of human progress is undercut throughout the poem since each stanza ends with a parenthetical portion noting God’s continued presence and rule in the world, regardless of human pride and arrogance. The last parenthesis is an apt way to finish the poem: “(Though they [man] lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, / Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?).” Lewis follows this up with two poems emphasizing the relationship between the spiritual life and sexual temptation.86 In both he is frank without being prurient. The three sonnet-like quatrains of “Quick!” (p. 189),87 recalling portions of Dymer, almost certainly deals with autoeroticism, particularly as the speaker emphasizes his struggles when “old festering fire begins to play / Once more within” and he wrenches his “hands the other way.” To his credit, the speaker, with the passion of John Donne in his “Holy Sonnet: Batter My Heart,” appeals to God to overpower his perverse desire and to replace it with a heavenly one: “Quick, Lord! Before new scorpions bring / New venom—ere fiends blow the fire / A second time—quick, show me that sweet thing / Which, ’spite of all, more deeply I desire.”88 Donne puts it this way: “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you / As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; / That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.89 The heat of unbridled lust is continued in “When Lilith Means to Draw Me” (pp. 190–191),90 a poem that suggests there is something ultimately unfulfilling, even emptying, when one reaches the end of repeated sexual gratification. The persona freely confesses Lilith, symbolizing sexual temptation, “does not overawe me / With beauty’s pomp and power.” As a matter of fact, he sees the cup (sexual gratification) she offers as unable to satisfy: “Her cup, whereof who taste, / (She promises no better) thirst far more.” In spite of this, he ponders why he returns again and again to her cup. His realization is that her offerings, while insipid and sterile, appear more satisfying than the dry, arid reality in which he moves and lives: “The witch’s wine, / Though promising nothing, seems / In that land of no streams, / To promise best—the unrelished anodyne.” These two poems, as well as the sexually explicit portions of Dymer, reveal that like most human beings Lewis knew the powerful pull of sexual temptation. “Once the Worm-laid Egg Broke in the Wood” (pp. 192–193)91 is an almost humorous poem in blank verse given from the point of view of an old, lonely dragon; full of self-pity over his isolation, he cannot bring himself to

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give up his golden hoard in exchange for fellowship with others. Actually, he has even eaten his mate since “worm grows not to dragon till he eat worm.” In particular he fears men who plot “in the towns to steal my gold,” whispering of him, “laying plans, / Merciless men.” He prays that God will give him peace, yet it is a hollow request since he wants such peace on his terms: “But ask not that I should give up the gold, / Nor move, nor die; others would get the gold. / Kill, rather, Lord, the men and the other dragons / That I may sleep, go when I will to drink.” “Soul’s ease,” serving God on our terms, praying, like King Claudius in Hamlet without truly repenting for the murder of his brother—“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (III. iii. pp. 69–70)—these sophisticated spiritual dodges are specious, revealing the bankruptcy of our souls.92 In addition, the poem implies many human beings are like the dragon—preferring material things over vital engagement with others. The second dragon poem focuses upon a dragon-slayer rather than a dragon.93 In “I Have Come Back with Victory Got” (pp. 195–196),94 the tercets reveal a warrior returning from killing a dragon. The warrior is filled with joy for having defeated his greatest foe and prepared to fight even greater battles. After describing the details of his victory, he claims that when he bit into the heart of his vanquished enemy, “I felt a pulse within me start / As though my breast would break apart.” Flushed with victory, he feels invincible: “Behemoth is my serving man! / Before the conquered hosts of Pan / Riding tamed Leviathan.”95 Still in celebration, he sings: “RESVRGAM and IO PAEAN, / IO, IO, IO, PAEAN!!”96 He realizes his conquest of the dragon has been a rite of passage, signifying his bravery, courage, and honor: “Now I know the stake I played for, / Now I know what a worm’s made for!” Avoiding pride, the warrior delights in experiencing his victory.97 The last three poems of PR concern God’s authority, man’s dignity, and angel’s wonder. In “I Am Not One That Easily Flits Past in Thought” (p. 197),98 the speaker considers the authority of God, especially over death and time. The rhyming alexandrines express the paradox that God both makes and unmakes: “Therefore among the riddles that no man has read / I put thy paradox, Who liveth and was dead. / As Thou hast made substantially, thou wilt unmake / In earnest and for everlasting.” While we might wish to recall those who have died, such musings are really futile: Whom Thy great Exit banishes, no after age Of epilogue leads back upon the lighted stage. Where is Prince Hamlet when the curtain’s down? Where fled Dreams at the dawn, or colours when the light is sped? We are thy colours, fugitive, never restored,

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Never repeated again. Thou only art the Lord, Thou only art holy.

In this, the most theocentric poem in the PR, Lewis affirms God’s sovereign rule over time as well and ends by recalling lines from Psalm 139: “Thou art Lord of the unbreathable transmortal air / Where mortal thinking fails: night’s nuptial darkness, where / All lost embraces intermingle and are bless’d, / And all die, but all are, while Thou continuest.”99 This paradoxical ending, that although all die they nonetheless “live” under the eternal authority of God, also echoes lines from the Te Deum: “When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, / Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.” “Passing To-day by a Cottage, I Shed Tears” (p. 198)100 shifts the focus to how God lends us the dignity of being created in His image, replete with both the positive and negative this encompasses. For instance, as humans we can know the pain of loss: “Passing to-day by a cottage, I shed tears / When I remembered how once I had dwelled there / With my mortal friends who are dead.” Nor does time heal such losses: “I, fool, believed / I had outgrown the local, unique sting, / I had transmuted away (I was deceived) / Into love universal the lov’d thing.” That is, God created us, unlike angels, with “the tether and pang of the particular”; because we are created in His image, we can know experientially the heights of pleasure but also the depths of pain. This profound dignity means that while we share His nature, we also enter into His knowledge, one involving responsibility and consequence. Accordingly, though we are small compared to Him, we “quiver with fire’s same / Substantial form as Thou—nor reflect merely, / As lunar angel, back to thee, cold flame. / Gods we are, Thou hast said: and we pay dearly.” Entering into the divine image means entering into divine suffering, but such price is worth the anguish it necessarily involves. The last poem in PR, “I Know Not, I” (pp. 198–199),101 plays off the previous poem as it presents an angel pondering over what it must be like to be a man: “I know not, I, / What the men together say, / How lovers, lovers die / And youth pass away.” He has no understanding of romantic love, aging, love of country, and especially human grief: “Why at grave [do] they grieve / For one voice and face, / And not, and not receive / Another in its place.” Yet, while the angel has in the past appeared satisfied with his even, emotionally balanced existence, the poem’s conclusion belies this: “Sorrow it is they call / This cup: whence my lip, / Woe’s me, never in all / My endless days must sip.” Paradoxically, the angel’s sorrow is his regret that he cannot experience the pang of the particular reserved only for human beings.102 The sixteen poems in PR are Lewis’s most moving, unified, and deliberate attempt at sustained religious verse. Although the poems appear within the text of this prose allegory, and thus rightly must be read as commentary on the

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story of John, the poems also exist outside the text,103 offering us insight into Lewis’s own spiritual and poetic maturation.104 In them we see him striving to come to grips with what his new faith in Christ means to his intellectual, sexual, and spiritual life. Lewis never again clusters this many poems around such a unified theme, and so the poems of PR testify to the artistic and spiritual progress of his poetic pilgrimage. As Lewis matured in Christ, he continued to write religious verse from pieces on the incarnation and the resurrection to ones on the seven deadly sins and the life of the soul. A favorite topic was prayer. He discussed it in disparate prose works such as The Screwtape Letters and Letters to Malcolm, while petitionary prayer was the subject of the essay “The Efficacy of Prayer” where he pondered over the following questions: If God is sovereign and omniscient, of what value is prayer? That is, if He knows already what is going to happen, why bother to ask Him to change His mind? Can our petitions to God really change His will?105 In the poems on prayer, Lewis does not offer a systematic theology of prayer, but rather snapshots of his thinking about prayer. For instance, in “Sonnet” Lewis connects the defeat of the cruel Assyrian conqueror, Sennacherib, recorded in 2 Kings 19 and by the historian Herodotus to the relationship between prayer and divine action.106 The biblical account suggests angels intervene to save Israel, while Herodotus ascribes the reason for Sennacherib’s defeat to mice “innumerably nibbling all one night . . . to eat his bowstrings piecemeal as warm wind eats ice.” This English sonnet in alexandrines melds the two accounts, suggesting the defeat occurred when angels worked through mice. Lewis does not find this odd, but instead sees in it a glimpse of God working through human prayer: “No stranger that omnipotence should choose to need / Small helps than great— no stranger if His action lingers / Till men have prayed, and suffers their weak prayers indeed / To move as very muscles His delaying fingers.” Lewis suggests, the divine enfeebles itself in order to work through the weak, thus lending the latter a dignity not its own: “Who, in His longanimity and love for our / Small dignities, enfeebles, for a time, His power.” More often than not, however, Lewis’s poems dealing with prayer do not focus upon the nature of prayer; instead, they are prayers. Sometimes they are powerful pleas for God’s intercession. The Italian sonnet “Legion” is such a poem. Akin to “Quick” from PR and Donne’s “Batter My Heart,” “Legion” implores God to see the real character of the speaker. The real man is the one who desperately turns to Him at the very moment of the poem’s composition: “Lord, hear my voice; this present voice, I mean, / Not that which may be speaking an hour hence / When pride or pity of self or craving sense / Blunt the mind’s edge, now momentarily clear.”107 He implores God not to consider the myriad of other selves within him that in only a few minutes will feign

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to be the real him. While he knows God will not override his free will, he beseeches Him to see his real will in this moment; if not, his warring selves may cancel God’s work in him: “Hold me to this. Oh strain / A point; use legal fictions. For, if all / My quarreling selves must bear an equal voice, / Farewell— thou hast created me in vain.” The desperate tone suggests the state of the soul familiar to many Christians who struggle with the internal war between the flesh and the spirit. Like Lewis, many have despaired of self and longed for Christ to overrule their wills. This is a poignant prayer for God’s grace. Rather than being an intercession for grace, “They Tell Me, Lord” is a poem where a speaker comes to a surprising conclusion about the dialogue of prayer.108 He notes some think prayer a futile exercise, “since but one voice is heard, it’s all dream, / One talker aping two.” He admits there is but one voice, but with this twist: the voice is not his, but God’s: “Seeing me empty, you forsake / The listener’s role and through / My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake / The thoughts I never knew.” Since, therefore, it is God speaking to him through prayer, God has no need to reply to Himself: “While we seem / Two talkers, thou are One forever, and I / No dreamer, but thy dream.”109 Lewis’s deeply penetrating spiritual insight about prayer—that when we are empty, then God can speak through and to us—rivals similar ones in The Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity. Other poems are prayerful meditations. For instance, Lewis’s “No Beauty We Could Desire” is about how one who seeks joy eventually finds it in Christ.110 The poem begins almost with a sigh as the speaker admits, “Yes, you are everywhere,” but then goes on to say he “could never bring the noble Hart to bay.” When he tried to track what he longed for, he was thwarted by confusing scents: “Nowhere sometimes, then again everywhere. / Other scents, too, seemed to them almost the same.” As a result, he stopped the search for joy through things (including poetry), and made himself available instead to be found by the source of the joy: “Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in one / Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing / So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade.” This realization was the fulcrum leveraging his understanding that in Christ there is a beauty beyond any earthly one: “Not in all food, not in all bread and wine / (Not, I mean, as my littleness requires) / But this wine, this bread . . . no beauty we could desire.” In the person of Christ there was no greater beauty for him to desire, and the Eucharist became a visible symbol of this beauty. The joy he found in Christ surpassed all earthly joys, and this poem becomes the measure of Lewis’s personal devotion to His Lord. Another prayerful meditation is “Epitaph,” a poem that finds the dead person it commemorates both a microcosm of the universe and a promise of future life in Lenten lands.111 Its opening lines effectively suggest the

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vastness of the universe summed up in this person’s life: “Here lies the whole world after one / Peculiar mode; a buried sun, / Stars and immensities of sky / And cities here discarded lie.”112 “Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman” is a later powerful reworking of this epitaph. Lewis concentrates his imagery more intensely in the opening lines of the revision: “Here the whole world (stars, water, air, / And field, and forest, as they were / Reflected in a single mind).” In addition, the revision contains Christian motifs, culminating in the promise of resurrection: “Like cast off clothes was left behind / In ashes yet with hope that she, / Re-born from holy poverty, / In lenten lands, hereafter may / Resume them on her Easter Day.”113 In addition to prayers of intercession and meditation, several of Lewis’s religious poems are confessions. For example, a confessional prayer with a tone similar to “Legion” is “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” written in heroic couplets.114 The speaker, famous for his brilliant defenses of the faith, his “cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf / At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh,” pauses and asks to be delivered from his own high opinion of himself: “Let me not trust, instead / Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.” As he approaches sleep, he prays to be delivered from all thoughts, even his thoughts of God, and especially from his thoughts of self: “Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye, / Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.” This frank admission of the danger of spiritual pride in the life of one who defends God is consistent with Lewis’s other writings on spiritual pride. He knows well that regardless of his best intentions, an outwardly successful apologist can seek self-glory rather than God’s. This prayer is a sober reminder against self-promotion. Lewis rarely wrote poems directly connected to a biblical narrative, perhaps in part because he saw little need to plow well-tilled ground. However in the instances where he plays off biblical narratives, the results are engaging. For example, “The Sailing of the Ark” is loosely based on the Old Testament story of Noah and the flood.115 In one of his most rhythmic and speculative poems, he imagines Ham, the youngest son of Noah, denying entry to one last animal as the rains begin.116 Ham is shown to be a shirker when one last animal is heard knocking at the door of the Ark. He warns his brothers not to answer because it will awaken their father: “Once he comes to see / What’s at the door it’s sure to mean more work for you and me.”117 Awakening finally to the pounding on the ark’s door, Noah is horrified to discover the forsaken animal is the unicorn. When it turns away, Noah curses his son: “Now all the world, O Ham, may curse the hour that you were born— / Because of you the Ark must sail without the Unicorn.” Despite this somewhat somber theme, the lively musical rhythm of the iambic heptameter lines makes this seriocomic poem very enjoyable to read aloud.

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“Stephen to Lazarus” melds two biblical narratives as the poem imagines St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr as described in Acts 6: 8–7:60, reflecting upon the resurrection of Lazarus found in John 11.118 In an interesting twist, Stephen wonders if Lazarus was not in fact the first martyr; he reasons this way by noting that while Stephen “gave up no more than life,” Lazarus gave up death and its peace. That is, while Stephen left this life and its vale of tears for the peace of death in Christ, Lazarus had to give up the peace of death and “put out a second time to sea / Well knowing that [his] death (in vain / Died once) must be all died again?” Stephen implies, therefore, that Lazarus’ resurrection to the pain of life is a more noble martyrdom than his to the peace of death. While poems linked to a biblical narrative are rare, those connected to biblical themes appear frequently. For example, in addition to “Sonnet” mentioned above where angels and mice work together to accomplish the defeat of Sennacherib, several poems focus upon angels. In “On Being Human” Lewis notes that while angels have some real advantages over mankind, they are also limited.119 Although the poem admits angels have direct knowledge of spiritual and philosophical truth denied to mankind, it subtly underscores that they lack the five senses God shares with mankind. Lewis uses humor to show that while angels understand the Platonic eternal forms of earthly realities, they lack rich, sensuous understanding of earthly experience: The lavish pinks, the new-mown field, the ravishing Sea-smell, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest; The tremor on the rippled pool of memory Which from each scent in widening circle goes, The pleasure and the pang—can angels measure it? An angel has no nose.120

Lewis’s point, therefore, is that in some ways it is better to be human than angelic. The playfulness of the poem is characteristic of many others, and its theme is an insightful gloss to the angelic eldila of the Ransom space trilogy. There Lewis describes them as “white and semi-transparent—rather like ice” with “inorganic” voices speaking syllables sounding “more as if they were played on an instrument than as if they were spoken . . . as if rock or crystal or light had spoken.”121 Two religious poems deal with the biblical theme of Christ’s nativity. “The Turn of the Tide” is finely crafted; for instance, Lewis uses internal rhyme in each odd line and final rhyme in each even line. In the poem Lewis focuses upon the very moment of Christ’s birth and how this marks a universal turn of the tide: from the certitude of death for all to the promise of new life for all.122 Profoundly influenced by Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,”

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Lewis, in a slow and deliberate fashion, chronicles how the spiritual impact of Christ’s birth quietly yet inexorably sweeps over the world invigorating and bringing to life a dead, silent planet.123 For instance, at the moment just before Christ’s birth, Lewis pictures a world on the verge of its dying moment: “Breathless was the air over Bethlehem; black and bare / The fields; hard as granite were the clods; Hedges stiff with ice; the sedge, in the vice / Of the ponds, like little iron rods. / The deathly stillness spread from Bethlehem.” By comparing the frozen, dead landscape to the adamantine spiritual torpor of mankind before Christ’s birth, Lewis effectively highlights the world’s inevitable spiritual ebb tide. He vividly portrays this deadly pallor by noting various notions connected with Christ’s nativity, beginning with Caesar and the Palatine and culminating in great Galactic lords asking: “Is this perhaps the last Of our story and the glories of our crown?— The entropy worked out?—the central redoubt Abandoned?—The world-spring running down?” Then they could speak no more. Weakness overbore Even them; they were as flies in a web, In lethargy stone-dumb. The death had almost come, And the tide lay motionless at ebb.

Yet at this critical juncture in the history of the universe, Lewis likens Christ’s birth to a stabbing “shock / Of returning life, the start, the burning pang at heart, / Setting galaxies to tingle and rock.” This event promises “rumor and noise of resuming joys / Along the nerves of the universe.” Symbolic of this renewal is “a music infinitely small,” yet clear, loud, and deep: “Such a note as neither Throne nor Potentate had known / Since the Word created the abyss.” At this universal sound “Heaven danced” and “revel, mirth and shout / Descended to” earth and the frozen universe began to thaw: “Saturn laughed and lost his latter age’s frost / And his beard, Niagaralike, unfroze.” The reviving universe reaches its fever pitch of rebirth in the reigniting of the Phoenix, which functions as a metaphor for Christ:124 A shiver of re-birth and deliverance round the Earth Went gliding; her bonds were released; Into broken light the breeze once more awoke the seas, In the forest it wakened every beast; Capripods fell to dance from Taproban to France, Leprechauns from Down to Labrador; In his green Asian dell the Phoenix from his shell Burst forth and was the Phoenix once more.

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In spite of the universal significance and magnitude of this paradoxical rebirth—the condemned cosmos revived by God’s incarnation—Lewis manages to treat it with great tenderness and poignancy: “So Death lay in arrest. But at Bethlehem the bless’d / Nothing greater could be heard / Than sighing wind in the thorn, the cry of One new-born, / And cattle in stable as they stirred.” Omnipotent God—Author, Creator, and Sustainer of all that was, is, and will be—contracted into a little child lying seemingly unnoticed in this humble of birth places. Furthermore, in these last lines Lewis alludes to Christ’s later crown of thorns and crucifixion by noting the ominous thorns through which the wind sighs. In his deft handling of the theme, images, and language in “The Turn of the Tide” we experience one of Lewis’s most powerful poems. “The Nativity” continues Lewis’s interest in God’s physical incarnation, but here he focuses instead upon the animals present at the nativity and links them to human parallels.125 Specifically, Lewis personifies three animals and attributes we associate with them to the state of the speaker’s spiritual condition. First, he says he is slow like an ox, but he sees “glory in the stable grow” so that “with the ox’s dullness” he eventually might gain “an ox’s strength.” Second, he says he is stubborn as an ass, but he sees “my Saviour where I looked for hay” so that through his ass-like folly he may learn “the patience of a beast.” Finally, he is like a straying sheep watching “the manger where my Lord is laid” so that his “baa-ing nature” (repentance) would someday win “some woolly innocence!” The spiritual condition of the speaker—from being as slow and dull as an ox to as stubborn and hard as an ass to as broken and contrite as an erring sheep—is nicely encapsulated in this brief reflection. Still other religious poems concern God’s glory, as does the Italian sonnet “Noon’s Intensity.”126 Utilizing the light of the sun as a metaphor for God’s glory, the octet identifies God’s “alchemic beams [that] turn all to gold.” The speaker then describes how sunlight, and by extension God’s glory, is spread over all the earth: “From the night / You will not yet withdraw her silver light, / And often with Saturnian tints the cold / Atlantic swells at morning shall enfold / The Cornish cliffs burnished with copper bright.” The poem goes on to suggest our sight may one day be “trained by slow degrees” until “we have such sight / As dares the pure projection to behold.” Biblical allusions come into focus in the sestet. For instance the lines “When Sol comes ascendant, it may be / More perfectly in him our eyes shall see / All baser virtues” recall Moses’ encounter with God in Exodus 33: 18-19a: “Then Moses said, ‘I pray Thee, show me Thy glory!’ And He said, ‘I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you” (NAS).127 The speaker delights in the fact that now he can “hear you [God] talking / And yet not die.” He adds that until he is given the opportunity “the pure projection to behold,” God has “left free, / Unscorched by your own

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noon’s intensity / One cool and evening hour for garden walking.” The final line alludes to a prelapsarian state and the immediate fellowship the speaker has with God when they would walk together in “the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). This ending also echoes the descent of Perelandra-Venus, a reflection of God’s glory and love, at the conclusion of That Hideous Strength: And now it came. It was fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light: it was Charity, not as mortals imagine it, not even as it has been humanised for them since the Incarnation of the Word, but the translunary virtue, fallen upon them direct from the Third Heaven, unmitigated. They were blinded, scorched, deafened. They thought it would burn their bones. They could not bear that it should continue. They could not bear that it should cease. So Perelandra, triumphant among planets, whom men call Venus, came and was with them in the room.128

“Noon’s Intensity” similarly celebrates God’s glory and his compelling love for man. A different kind of spiritual insight occurs in “Deadly Sins” where Lewis reflects upon the all-pervasive nature of the seven deadly sins in human life.”129 The history of the seven deadly sins in the church, especially the development of a list of seven, is somewhat problematic. Early church fathers, including Hermas, Tertullian, and Augustine, while never actually listing specific “deadly” sins, did suggest some sins were worse than others, perhaps with 1 John 5:16–17 in mind: “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death.” What eventually resulted, therefore, were numerous lists of especially harmful sins. However, the list that came to be most influential in the church was the one developed by Gregory the Great (pp. 540–605) characterized by its Latin acronym, saligia: superbia (pride), avaritia (greed), luxuria (luxury, later lust), invidia (envy), gula (gluttony), ira (anger), and acedia (sloth).130 Lewis was no stranger to the literary life of these sins since they appear in works he knew well including William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Dante’s Divine Comedia, Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale,” and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Furthermore, Lewis writes about them himself in The Allegory of Love. For example, while commenting on Langland, Lewis says that his “excellent satiric comedy, as displayed in the behavior of the seven Deadly Sins belongs to a tradition as old as the Ancren Riwle.”131 In addition, in other works he refers to specific sins on the list. For instance, in Mere Christianity he saves an entire chapter for pride (“the great sin”); in Screwtape Letters he devotes letters to lust (IX, XVII), and pride (XXIV); and in The Great Divorce he pictures sinners

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unable to choose heaven because of greed, sloth, and envy. Accordingly, it is no surprise that he writes a poem centered on the seven deadly sins.132 He begins by noting how all of them “through our lives [their] meshes run / Deft as spiders’ catenation, / Crossed and crossed again and spun / Finer than the fiend’s temptation.” He then devotes a four-line stanza to each. Sloth, “deadly” according to the church fathers because it deadened one to vigorous spiritual life, Lewis portrays in like manner: “Sloth that would find out a bed / Blind to morning, deaf to waking, / Shuffling shall at last be led / To the peace that know no breaking.” In Piers Plowman Langland shows Sloth similarly: I’ve never visited the sick, or prisoners in their cells. And I’d much rather hear a filthy story or watch a shoemakers’ farce in summer, or laugh at a lot of lying scandal about my neighbours, than listen to all that Gospel stuff—Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. As for vigils and fast-days, I give all that a miss; and in Lent I lie in bed with my girl in my arms till mass and matins are well and truly over. I then make off for the friars’ church, and if I get to the place before the priest’s “go, mass is finished,” I feel I’ve done my bit. Sometimes I never get to confession even once in a year, unless a bout of sickness scares me into it; and then I produce some confused mishmash or other.133

About greed, Lewis writes: “Avarice, while she finds an end, / Counts but small the largest treasure. / Whimperingly at last she’ll bend / To take free what has no measure.” Lewis uses a clever sexual pun to illustrate the pull of lust: “Lechery, that feels sharp lust / Sharper from each promised staying, / Goes at long last—go she must— / Where alone is sure allaying.” In each case, the particular sin leads eventually to God because the sin simply repeated does not ultimately satisfy: “So inexorably thou / On thy shattered foes pursuing / Never a respite dost allow / Save what works their own undoing.” Ironically, deadly sins both consume and feed our fractured experience. In spite of sin’s very real presence in our lives, Lewis’s most powerful religious poem, “Love’s as Warm as Tears,” is not about sin; instead it is about love.134 In four brief stanzas Lewis helps us see that love exists in at least four forms reminiscent of his The Four Loves. The loves are often in striking contrast to one another. For instance, the first stanza focuses upon affectionate love, or what he calls storge in The Four Loves: “Love’s as warm as tears, / Love is tears: / Pressure within the brain / Tension at the throat.” This is familiar, weeping, tender, emotional love common to those who know each other well. Yet in the second stanza, he considers bold, passionate, burning love: “Love’s as fierce as fire, / Love is fire: / All sorts—infernal heat / Clinkered with greed and pride.” This is what he calls eros in The Four Loves; it is the consuming, painful, possessive, sexual love known best to lovers. In the third stanza he writes of love that is anticipated: “Love’s as fresh as spring, / Love

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is spring: / Bird-song hung in the air, / Cool smell in a wood.” Such love is expectant, exciting, and encouraging. The final stanza tells us of sacrificial, selfless, unconditional love; it is a hard love born of total giving, what he calls agape in The Four Loves: Love’s as hard as nails, Love is nails: Blunt, thick, hammered through The medial nerves of One Who, having made us, knew The thing He had done, Seeing (with all that is) Our cross, and His.

The tone of this stanza is unexpected, and the abrupt shift to the cross and Christ’s suffering catches us by surprise; we can feel the pounding of the hammer and the nails piercing flesh. At the same time, this refocus is entirely appropriate and raises the poem from being just another poem about human love to a moving testimony about the depth and breath of divine love. In order to secure man for Himself, God, who spans the universe with his outstretched hands, contracts Himself onto the cross and willingly takes our place of suffering. This is certain, costly, and compassionate love. “Love’s as Warm as Tears” is without doubt Lewis’s finest religious poem. This survey of Lewis’s religious verse shows him moving from the cruel, malicious deity of SB to the possessive, jealous Yahweh of PR to the sacrificial savior of “Love’s as Warm as Tears.”135 In addition, the religious poems reveal Lewis as using poetry to reflect deeply about life in Christ, while avoiding self-conscious navel-gazing or self-righteous posturing. Perhaps most noticeable is the absence of mawkish, maudlin emotion, too often a detrimental characteristic of religious verse. While Lewis’s religious poems as a whole are not as effective as those of George Herbert and John Donne—the two poets who combined most winsomely their faith in Christ with their craft as lyric poets—Lewis’s religious poetry offers powerful testimony to the role faith and verse played in his imaginative life. In reviewing Lewis’s comical, satirical, contemplative, and religious poems, several points should be noted. First, the poems of the 1930s are split between the theologically introspective pieces of The Pilgrim’s Regress and eleven others, the majority with literary or environmental themes. Second, Lewis’s production of these poems peaked in the 1940s, suggesting this was the decade where he reached his imaginative pinnacle. This is supported when we note this was also the decade when he wrote The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters,

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The Abolition of Man, Perelandra, The Great Divorce, That Hideous Strength, Miracles, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Moreover, during this same time period he delivered the BBC radio broadcasts that later resulted in Mere Christianity. It is tempting, therefore, to think of Lewis during the 1940s as a literary dynamo. Third, the number of poems he published in the 1950s dropped significantly, ranging from pointed satires, to dark prophecies, to mature musings. While there is no way to determine why he published fewer poems, given the passing of Mrs. Janie Moore and his evergrowing responsibilities, including the start of his friendship with Joy and his shift from Oxford to Cambridge, the simple demands upon his time may have precluded opportunities to work on poems. Fourth, Lewis sometimes used topical poems to retreat into himself in order to counterbalance his much more public appearances in prose, since these were the decades of his prolific production of combative Christian apologetics. Having essentially abandoned narrative verse, Lewis employed these short topical poems to give voice to his muted but never forgotten poetic sensibilities. Finally, Lewis’s “public” poetry—poems that are primarily comic and satiric—is often witty, combative, percussive, shrill, and/or rhetorical. When he turns to social commentary, he is critical of the contemporary, favoring traditional core values and “stock responses.” On the other hand, his “private” poetry—poems that are contemplative and religious—is personal, subjective, reflective, and vulnerable. As he considers issues central to the human condition, he engages in analysis and frequently is tentative, open-ended, searching, and questioning. Throughout all, Lewis employed the topical poems to give voice to his muted but never abandoned poetic sensibilities. NOTES 1. Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964); The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1994); hereafter Collected Poems. 2. For a complete discussion of Lewis’s topical poems, see C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), chapters 6–8, 169–223. 3. Lewis often linked comic and satiric poems. For example, in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944) he writes that “a third group of [William Dunbar’s] poems is comic; if you will, satiric, though ‘abusive’ would be a better word” (p. 93). 4. The Oxford Magazine 52 (November 30, 1933), 298 (with Owen Barfield). 5. The Atlantic Monthly 172 (November 1943), 113, 115. Reprinted in Collected Poems.

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6. Lewis may be imitating songs of W. S. Gilbert in his poem. For instance, his use of internal rhyme and meter (loosely) is akin to Little Buttercup’s opening aria in H. M. S. Pinafore or The Lass that Loved a Sailor: “I’ve snuff and tobaccy and excellent jacky, / I’ve scissors, and watches, and knives; / I’ve ribbons and laces to set off the faces / Of pretty young sweethearts and wives.” Compare to the opening of “Awake, My Lute”: “I stood in the gloom of a spacious room / Where I listened for hours (on and off ) / To a terrible bore with a beard like a snore / And a heavy rectangular cough.” 7. See The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: The Modern Library, n. d.), 920–921. 8. Ibid., 901. 9. Punch 225 (November 4, 1953), 553 (Nat Whilk). Revised and reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems as Part 2 of “Narnian Suite.” No less than four different versions of this poem exist in holograph indicating either Lewis’s enjoyment of the sounds he fashions for the poem or his frustrations in trying to get the right combination of sounds. 10. However, in the satiric poems the percussive tone that comes across is brittle, pedantic, querulous, combative, or acidic. I am indebted to James Prothero for the term percussive. 11. Poems, 31; reprinted in Collected Poems. A holograph of this poem is available in the Bodleian Library. Interestingly, another holograph, “A Wedding Has Been Arranged,” is a slightly different version of “The Small Man Orders His Wedding.” Still another version is in the Bodleian, MS. Eng. C. 2724, fol. 55; it has the title “An Epithalamium for John Wain feigned to be spoken in his person giving orders for his wedding” signed C. S. L., June 1947. There also appear to be fragments of early drafts of this version of the poem. 12. The Oxford Magazine 55 (May 6, 1937), 565 (N. W.). Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 13. Punch 225 ( July 15, 1953), 91 (N. W.). He uses the Sapphic stanza here. Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. In the essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” reprinted in Of Other Worlds: Essays & Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), Lewis defends his “Peter Pantheism” from similarly scornful critics (see below). 14. Lewis takes up the same issue in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” where he defends his love of fairy tale: Now the modern critical world uses “adult” as a term of approval. It is hostile to what it calls “nostalgia” and contemptuous of what it calls “Peter Pantheism.” Hence a man who admits that dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development. If I spend some little time defending myself against these charges, this is not so much because it matters greatly whether I am scorned and pitied as because

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the defence is germane to my whole view of the fairy tale and even of literature in general. (In Of Other Worlds, p. 25) 15. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 16(6) (June 1959), 47. Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 16. Of Other Worlds, 61–62. For more on this, see in the same volume “On Stories” as well as the complete text of “On Science Fiction.” 17. The Cambridge Review 79 (November 30, 1957), 227 (N. W.). Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. Some have suggested Joy Davidman assisted Lewis in composing this poem and that they sang it as a parody of Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee or Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us. 18. Nine: A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism 2 (May 1950), 114. Revised (a second stanza is added) and reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 19. The Month 11 (May 1954), 272. Revised and reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 20. Lewis himself fell under the gaze of such tabloids when a woman claimed Lewis was going to marry her. See Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 55–65. 21. In the essay “Religion and Rocketry” Lewis puts it this way: We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. (From The World’s Last Night and Other Essays [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952], 89) 22. Poems, 60; reprinted in Collected Poems. 23. Punch 227 (December 1, 1954), 685 (N. W.). The title means “Spartan having obtained.” Revised and retitled “A Confession” in Poems and Collected Poems. 24. The Spectator 181 (July 30, 1948), 142. Revised and retitled “Epigrams and Epitaphs, No. 14” in Poems and Collected Poems. 25. Of course a literal reading gives it that democracy is the tyranny of majority rule that will not permit the radio to be turned off. 26. Collected Poems, 249. 27. Vortigen, also spelled Wyrtgeorn (fl. 425–450), was king of the Britons at the time of the arrival of the Saxons. “He accepted the assistance of the Saxons in order to protect his kingdom against the Picts and Scots, granting them land as compensation. Later the Britons made war on the Saxons in their Kentish strongholds. After the death in battle of Vortemir, Vortigern’s son, against the Saxons, the Historia Brittonum

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records the massacre of the British nobles, and Vortigern’s subsequent grant of Essex and Sussex to the invaders.” Except for this poem, Lewis does not write much poetry about World War II. In part this is because he was neither in active service nor on the battlefield; in part because he was older, more mature, and no longer angry with God; and in part because he used prose primarily to deal with the war, especially The Screwtape Letters and his essay “Learning In War-time.” 28. Collected Poems, 250–252. A holograph of this poem exists and may be viewed in the Bodleian Library. London has a Finchley Lane, Finchley Court, Finchley Park, Finchley Place, Finchley Road, and a Finchley Way, but it does not have a Finchley Avenue. Kathryn Lindskoog has questioned the legitimacy of “Finchley Avenue,” first published in Occasional Poets: An Anthology (1986) and subsequently published in Collected Poems; see her The Lewis Legacy 65 (Summer 1995). 29. This recalls a passage from C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, 1955): “The New House [Little Lea] is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles” (p. 10). 30. In Surprised by Joy Lewis writes: “One dominant factor in our life [Lewis and Warren] at home was the daily absence of our father from about nine in the morning till six at night. . . . From the very first we built up for ourselves a life that excluded him” (pp. 40, 119). 31. The Oxford Magazine 56 (February 10, 1938), 383 (N. W.). Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 32. Besides the inverted biblical allusion seen in “trees as men walking,” this phrase may anticipate Tolkien’s Ents. 33. Punch 221 (September 12, 1951), 303 (N. W.). Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. He uses the Asclepiadean stanza here. 34. In this regard the poem links to The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943) since it is not just the loss of the meaning of language that concerns Lewis; he is as concerned with the loss of objective truth that follows the destruction of language: “You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive,’ or dynamism, or selfsacrifice, or ‘creativity.’ In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful” (p. 35). 35. Fifty-Two: A Journal of Books and Authors 14 (Autumn 1964), 4. Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 36. “De Descriptione Temporum” is reprinted in Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 37. Lewis’s “timeless rays” may be thought of as objective truths reflected in the “dew drop” of the present moment.

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38. Poems, 114–115; reprinted in Collected Poems. 39. The poem recalls passages from Spirits in Bondage. 40. The language in the poem anticipates the more belligerent attitude of the dwarves in The Last Battle (London: Bodley Head, 1956) who refuse to believe they are enjoying a feast in the stable in celebration of Aslan’s return. Refusing to “be taken in,” they taste hay, turnips, old cabbage leaves, and trough water instead of pies, pigeons, ices, and rich wine. They insist at the end: “We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.” Aslan notes, “they have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out” (p. 148). At least initially the persona in the poem has the same reluctance to enter into joy; he does not want to be “taken in” yet again. 41. Also helpful regarding the theme and language of this poem is Stephen Metcalf, “Language and Self-Consciousness: The Making and Breaking of C. S. Lewis’s Personae,” in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 109–144. 42. Punch 217 (August 17, 1949), 170 (Nat Whilk). Revised and reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 43. The sentiment expressed here links the poem to Lewis’s earlier “Joy.” See “Early Lyric Poetry: Spirits in Bondage (1919) and ‘Joy’ (1924).” 44. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 168–169. 45. All the poems in this volume are published anonymously; however, six copies contain an additional leaf giving the names of the authors of the poems; one of these is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 46. Fear No More: A Book of Poems for the Present Time by Living English Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 4. Reprinted in Collected Poems. 47. The Month 7 (May 1952), 275. Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 48. What does the map represent? His settled way of seeing the world, one characterized by “stock responses” and tradition? His spiritual convictions? Biblical texts? While we cannot be certain what the map represents, the significant point is that he momentarily questioned its validity. Such contemplation may be seen by some as disturbing; nonetheless, the poem reveals one who was always thinking, reflecting, and musing. 49. The Spectator 174 (June 8, 1945), 521. See erratum: “Poet and Printer,” ibid. (June 15, 1945), 550. Reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 50. Of course the salamander could be the butt of Lewis’ satire if Lewis is subtly glossing the poem to Plato’s myth of the cave from Book VII of The Republic. 51. His genetic propensity toward pessimism and the general gloom and darkness of the world because of the competing philosophies of World War II—nazism, communism, socialism, totalitarianism, capitalism, and so on—may have had a grip upon Lewis at this time.

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52. Poems, 73–76; reprinted in Collected Poems. In DSCL Walter Hooper says: “The first version of this sonnet sequence survives in the same notebook as the last portion of the Diary. A revised version of it, entitled ‘Infatuation,’ is found in Lewis’s Poems” (p. 403). If accurate, this means Lewis first worked on the poem in 1926. 53. See Shakespeare’s sonnets “129,” “138,” and “147.” 54. Lewis also uses the idea of Venus infernal in Letter XX of The Screwtape Letters. 55. Poems, 81; reprinted in Collected Poems. 56. Kathryn Lindskoog’s fascination with this poem turns on her seeing in Lewis’s use of reason and imagination in the poem a confirmation the right brain/left brain polarity. She brings in references to Till We Have Faces and The Pilgrim’s Regress as well as allusions to right brain/left brain authorities to bolster her contention. See her “Getting It Together: Lewis and the Two Hemispheres of Knowing.” Journal of Psychology and Theology 3 (Fall 1975), 290–293. Reprinted in Mythlore 6 (Winter 1979), 43–45. Also revised and published as “Appendix Two” in Finding the Landlord (Chicago, IL: Cornerstone Press, 1995). A very fine discussion of the poem may be found in Peter Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), ix and 179–188. 57. Britain Today 112 (August 1945), 14. Revised and retitled “To Charles Williams” in Poems and Collected Poems. Williams died May 15, 1945. 58. Poems, 83; reprinted in Collected Poems. 59. Joe Christopher offers criticism of these poems assuming Lewis was writing about Joy Davidman. See his “C. S. Lewis, Love Poet.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (Fall 1989), 161–173, and “C. S. Lewis’s Poems to Joy Davidman.” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 94 (Autumn 1998), 20–37. 60. Poems, 108; reprinted in Collected Poems. 61. I am indebted to Dabney Hart for her helpful insight on this point. 62. Poems, 109; reprinted in Collected Poems. 63. Poems, 109–110; reprinted in Collected Poems. 64. Joe Christopher argues similarly in his essay “C. S. Lewis, Love Poet.” He says “Joys That Sting,” “Old Poets Remembered,” and “As the Ruin Falls” are sonnets probably written to Joy Davidman: “In all of them the woman addressed is dying: they could have been written during Davidman’s first bout with cancer, but—since Lewis only began to know he loved her during that time—the probability is stronger for the second and final bout with cancer” (pp. 167–168). His analyses of these poems are more prosaic than enlightening, though he is right when he says these are among “Lewis’s best verse, clever, polished, and . . . highly successful” (p. 173). 65. Given the popularity of The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and Mere Christianity, attention should be given to his religious verse since many offer commentary on his prose apologetics as well as powerful insights into his maturation in Christ. 66. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1933). 67. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 228–229.

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68. In the “Introduction” to Collected Poems Hooper notes a number of these poems may have existed in early variants: “Fourteen of [his] religious lyrics were sent to Owen Barfield during the summer of 1930 under the general title ‘Half Hours with Hamilton,’ and they are some of the most beautiful poems Lewis wrote. Most of these same poems were to appear a couple of years later in his semiautobiographical The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933). They were always Lewis’s favourites of his own poems” (p. xv). “Half Hours with Hamilton” in holograph is available at the Wade Center. 69. In Poems Hooper titles this “Footnote to All Prayers” (p. 129). 70. Must reading in connection with Pilgrim’s Regress is Kathryn Lindskoog’s Finding the Landlord. Because my focus is upon the poetry of Pilgrim’s Regress, I will discuss the poems in isolation from the prose text of Pilgrim’s Regress. However, I will offer commentary about the context of the poem’s placement in Pilgrim’s Regress in the accompanying notes. 71. In Poems this is “Caught” (pp. 115–116). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 8, chapter 6 entitled “Caught.” John, having thought he had escaped from the Landlord, suddenly awakened to the fact that there was nowhere to escape him: “In one night the Landlord— call him by what name you would—had come back to the world, and filled the world, quite full without a cranny. His eyes stared and His hand pointed and His voice commanded in everything that could be heard or seen . . . All things said one word: CAUGHT—caught into slavery again, to walk warily and on sufferance all his days, never to be alone; never the master of his own soul, to have no privacy, no corner whereof you could say to the whole universe: This is my own, here I can do as I please.” (p. 147) 72. In Poems this is “The Naked Seed” (p. 117). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 8, chapter 10, entitled “Archetype and Ectype.” John and the hermit (History) discuss John’s fear that “the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire.” The hermit assures him that the Landlord is the author of desire and that only He can fulfill John’s desire. Furthermore, the hermit affirms that John’s loss of his initial desire is normal: “First comes delight: then pain: then fruit. And then there is joy of the fruit, but that is different again from the first delight. And mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step: for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair. You must not try to keep the raptures: they have done their work. Manna kept, is worms” (p. 162). The hermit sings the poem and is overheard by John. 73. From The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1974), 127. 74. In Poems this is “Wormwood” (p. 87). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 1 entitled “The Same Yet Different.” John and Vertue are off on their regress, for John the start of his life in Christ. John complains that “Mother Kirk [the church] treats us very ill. Since we have followed her and eaten her food the way

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seems twice as narrow and twice as dangerous as it did before” (p. 177). Vertue sings the poem as John and he start their journey. 75. In Poems this is “Divine Justice” (p. 98). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 3 entitled “Limbo.” John learns from his Guide (Slikisteinsauga) that human wisdom is not adequate to know the Landlord. Sadly, those who rely upon wisdom cut themselves off from hope and God’s mercy: “The Landlord does not condemn them to lack of hope: they have done that themselves. The Landlord’s interference is all on the other side. Left to itself, the desire without the hope would soon fall back to spurious satisfactions, and these souls would follow it of their own free will into far darker regions at the very bottom of the black hole [hell]. What the Landlord has done is to fix it forever: and by his art, though unfulfilled, it is uncorrupted” (pp. 179–180). The Guide then sings the poem to John. For more on the triolet, see Joe R. Christopher, “A Theological Triolet,” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 2 (September 1971), 4–5. 76. In The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946) George MacDonald puts it differently: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell” (p. 72). 77. In Poems this is “Nearly They Stood” (102–103). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 4 entitled “The Black Hole.” John questions the goodness of the Landlord for having created the black hole. The Guide counters with the argument that the Landlord created humans with a free will able to make free choices. If they end up in the black hole, it is because that is where they want to be. Returning to his argument of the previous chapter, the Guide underscores that the black hole is actually merciful since it limits the sufferings of those who choose to be there: “A black hole is blackness enclosed, limited . . . But evil of itself would never reach a worst: for evil is fissiparous and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction . . . The walls of the black hole are the tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached. It is the Landlord’s last service to those who will let him do nothing better for them” (p. 181). The Guide then sings the poem to John. Lewis’s three eight-line stanzas follow a set pattern of six lines of trimeter, one line of pentameter, and one line of dimeter with a rhyme scheme of ababcdcd. 78. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 4:58–67. 79. Spiritual pride is also a central theme in his fiction. 80. In Poems this is “Virtue’s Independence” (p. 88). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 5 entitled “Superbia.” As John and Vertue continue their regress, they come upon a gaunt woman who was “scrabbling and puddering to and fro on what appeared to be a mirror; but it was only the rock itself scraped clean of every speck of dust and fibre of lichen and polished by the continued activity of this famished creature” (p. 182). The Guide tells them she is one of the Enemy’s [Satan’s] daughters. As they pass she “croaks out” the poem.

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81. In Poems this is “Posturing” (p. 89). Also in “Superbia” Vertue sings this song after the Guide warns him and John about the dangers of self-sufficiency. Lewis’s ababcc rhyme scheme (the last stanza adds cc) recalls the rhyme scheme of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” 82. This recalls an incident Lewis recounts in a letter to Greeves: What worreys [sic] me much more is Pride [Lewis’s emphasis]—my besetting sin . . . During my afternoon “meditations” . . . I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sort of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought “What an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!” I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. (They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves [1914−1963], ed. Walter Hooper [New York: Macmillan, 1979], 339 [hereafter TST]; January 30, 1930) 83. The English Poems of George Herbert, 140. 84. In Poems this is “Deception” (p. 90). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 6 entitled “Ignorantia.” The Guide tells John and Vertue that the shift to a machine age is cutting people off from a knowledge of the truth: “Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving time have banished leisure from their country (p. 187). He then sings this poem. Lewis experiments with the unusual rhyme scheme of abbbbbcd in the three stanzas. 85. One wonders what Lewis would have said about the popular TV “talk-shows” of today. Also see his “Odora Canum Vis: A Defence of Certain Modern Biographers and Critics” discussed later in this chapter. 86. Appropriately both poems appear in the chapter entitled “Luxuria.” 87. In Poems this is “Forbidden Pleasure” (p. 116). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 7 entitled “Luxuria.” John notices on the side of the road men who “seemed to be suffering from some disease of a crumbling and disintegrating kind” (p. 188). As he looks closer, he sees tumors detach themselves from the bodies and turn into writhing reptiles. In a passage that merges elements of Cantos XXV and XXIX of Dante’s Inferno, Lewis takes John through Luxuria, “a very dangerous place.” He sees a witch (sexual indulgence) holding out a cup to the sufferers. In particular he sees a young man, who though like the others is diseased, “he was still a well-looking person. And as the witch came to him the hands shot out to the cup, and the man drew them back again: and the hands went crawling out for the cup a second time, and again the man wrenched them back, and turned his face away” (p. 189). The young man then cries out the poem.

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88. The request here that God break in to override human will is similar to that of “He Whom I Bow To” and “Legion.” 89. The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967), 344. 90. In Poems this is “Lilith” (p. 95). An earlier version of this poem appears in TST, 353–354 (letter of April 29, 1930). This poem is also in “Luxuria.” After John sees the young man sink into a horrible swamp, the witch approaches him with this temptation: “I will not deceive you . . . You see there is no pretence. I am not trying to make you believe that this cup will take you to your Island [the good that John has always desired—heaven]. I am not saying it will quench your thirst for long. But taste it, none the less, for you are very thirsty” (pp. 189–190). John continues his walk without acknowledging her. She tries two more times to tempt him, appealing primarily to the immediate satisfaction he will receive by succumbing to her offer, but he continues on, never even speaking to her. The temptation she offers him is very real, but he uses the poem he speaks to help put her temptation out of his mind. Lewis uses a variation on rhyme royal; instead of the traditional ababbcc, he uses ababccb. 91. In Poems this is “The Dragon Speaks” (pp. 92–93). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book. 10, chapter 8 entitled “The Northern Dragon.” John journeys to face the northern dragon (avarice, hardness, and coldness), but before he confronts him, John hears the dragon sing this poem. After hearing the poem, John almost feels pity for the dragon, but he recovers his senses and manages to slay the dragon after he is attacked. 92. Lewis explores this again in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the person of Eustace Clarence Scrubb. 93. The dragon (a symbol of evil here) is overcome by the warrior (the faithful believer) who exercises his prowess (God’s blessing). 94. In Poems this is “Dragon-Slayer” (p. 94). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 9 entitled “The Southern Dragon.” Vertue returns from his victory with the southern dragon (unrestrained emotion) and appears dazzling: “At first they thought that is was the sun upon his arms that made Vertue flash like flame as he came leaping, running, and dancing towards them. But as he drew nearer they saw that he was veritably on fire. Smoke came from him, and where his feet slipped into the bog holes there were little puffs of steam. Hurtless flames ran up and down his sword and licked over his hand. His breast heaved and he reeled like a drunk man” (p. 195). Delighting in his newfound passion, Vertue shouts out this poem as John and the Guide draw near to him. 95. Leviathan and Behemoth allude to legendary creatures of enormous size as found in Job 3:8 and 40:15. 96. RESVRGAM is “I shall rise again” and IO PAEAN is the cry of praise a Greek warrior would have made celebrating his victory over a foe. 97. Although there is always the temptation to reserve for self some of the glory that should rightly go to God, this poem intimates the warrior here

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manages to delight in a job well done without subsuming to the pull of vainglory. 98. In Poems this is “When the Curtain’s Down” (p. 97). The poem is found in Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 10, chapter 10 entitled “The Brook.” John and Vertue are now back in Puritania approaching the final stream (death). Vertue speaks this poem as evidence of his newly acquired passion, and he reflects that death is no longer a thing to fear. 99. Consider: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you” (Ps 139: 7–12). 100. In Poems this is “Scazons” (p. 118). The melancholic theme of this poem links it to both “Angel’s Song” and “Lines Written in a Copy of Milton’s Works.” The poem is also in “The Brook.” John reflects briefly on the Landlord’s wisdom in creating humans with the capacities to love people and places before speaking this poem. 101. In Poems this is “Angel’s Song” (p. 107). The poem is also in “The Brook” and ends Pilgrim’s Regress. John and Vertue pass over the brook and the voice of the Guide is heard singing this poem. 102. Lewis’s debt to Milton is evident in this poem as it recalls Adam’s speech to Raphael in Book VIII of Paradise Lost where he thanks the angel for counseling him to be “lowly wise” regarding the ways of God: How fully hast thou satisfi’d me, pure Intelligence of Heav’n, Angel serene, And freed from intricacies, taught to live The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts To interrupt the sweet of Life, from which God hath bid dwell far off all anxious cares, And not molest us, unless we ourselves Seek them with wand’ring thoughts, and notions vain (pp. 180–187). 103. The independent “life” of the poems is clearly established by many having originally been a part of Lewis’s “Half Hours with Hamilton” written in 1930, three years before the publication of Pilgrim’s Regress. 104. For more on the relationship between the poems and the text of Pilgrim’s Regress see Kathryn Lindskoog’s Finding the Landlord. 105. See The Atlantic Monthly 203 (January 1959): 59–61. Reprinted in The World’s Last Night (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1960). 106. The Oxford Magazine 54 (May 14, 1936), 575 (N. W.). Reprinted in Poems.

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107. The Month 13 (April 1955): 210. Revised and reprinted in Poems. The desperate tone of the speaker in this sonnet recalls many of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets.” 108. First published in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 67–68. Revised and retitled “Prayer” in Poems. 109. In Letters to Malcolm offers the following: “Dream makes it too like Pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme. But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God” (p. 68). 110. For this reason it is an interesting gloss on Surprised by Joy. It is in Poems, 124–125. 111. The Month 2 (July 1949): 8. Retitled “Epigrams and Epitaphs, No. 17” in Poems and Collected Poems. Lewis later reworked this epitaph at Joy’s request and used the revision as the epitaph marking her memorial at the Oxford Crematorium in “Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman.” Hooper publishes this in Collected Poems, 252. In the “Introduction” to Collected Poems Hooper explains how these variations came about: Sometimes [sic] before his marriage Lewis wrote two versions of an “Epitaph.” The one he planned to use in Young King Cole appears as Epitaph 17 . . . When Joy read this poem she knew she was dying and she asked that it be used as her epitaph. In July 1963 Lewis revised the epitaph with her in mind and arranged for it to be cut into marble and placed in the Oxford Crematorium. (p. xviii) 112. This opening may owe something to the microcosm/macrocosm we find in Donne’s “A Valediction: Of Weeping”: “Let me pour forth / My tears before thy face whilst I stay here, / For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, / And by this mintage they are something worth, / For thus they be / Pregnant of thee.” 113. For more on this see Joe R. Christopher’s “C. S. Lewis, Love Poet.” 114. Poems, 129. Joe R. Christopher in “An Analysis of ‘The Apologist’s Evening Prayer.’” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 5 (October 1974), 2–4, looks at how the tone of this poem “is much like Donne” (p. 2). He notes similarities in the use of pronouns (for example, “Thou”), parallelism of the “From all” phrase, and the balanced, antithetical phrasing. Christopher sidesteps the question of whose poetry is best and ends with “we are left with a simpler-than-Donne poem in Donne’s tradition” (p. 4). 115. The biblical narrative is found in Genesis 6–9. 116. Punch 215 (August 11, 1948): 124 (N. W.). Revised and retitled “The Late Passenger” in Poems and Collected Poems. 117. Lewis’s portrayal of Ham supports the biblical narrative. For instance, in Genesis 9:20–27, Ham brings shame upon his father by viewing the nakedness of his drunken father and then telling his brothers about it. After Shem and Japheth take discreet measures to cover their father’s nakedness and Noah awakens to discover

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what has happened, he blesses the older two but curses Ham: “Cursed by Canaan [Ham]; / A servant of servants / He shall be to his brothers.” 118. Poems, 125; reprinted in Collected Poems. For an account of Stephen’s martyrdom, see Acts 6: 8–8: 1. Lewis treats the same subject in A Grief Observed, 34. 119. Punch 210 (May 8, 1946), 402 (N. W.). Revised and reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 120. Lewis writes to Ruth Pitter about this humor: “The bathos about angels having no nose etc. was intended: I wanted a serio-comic effect” (Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, volume 2, ed. Walter Hooper. [London: Harper Collins, 2004], 736, August 10, 1946). 121. Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 17, 18. 122. Punch (Almack) 215 (November 1, 1948), n.p. (N. W.). Revised and reprinted in Poems and Collected Poems. 123. Among the many similarities the two poems share include beginning with a frozen landscape, use of pagan and Christian imagery, the reviving power of music, the symbolic rebirth of the world at Christ’s birth, similar lines (Milton’s “The Oracles are dumb” becomes Lewis’s “That oracle was dumb”), and ending focusing upon the poignancy of Christ in the manger. 124. This is akin to Father Christmas’s influence on the winter of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 125. Poems, 122; reprinted in Collected Poems. 126. Ibid., 114. 127. The passage continues: “‘And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.’ But He said, ‘You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!’ Then the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen’” (Ex. 33:19b-23, NAS). 128. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. 323 129. Poems, 91–92; reprinted in Collected Poems. 130. The best study of the seven deadly sins is found in Morton W. Bloomfield’s The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan State University, 1952, reprint, 1967). 131. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 159–160. 132. There has also been work on the possible relationship between Lewis’s seven Narnia tales and the seven deadly sins. See my “Narnia and the Seven Deadly Sins,” Mythlore 10 (Spring 1984), 14–19. 133. William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Trans. A. V. C. Schmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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134. Poems, 122–123. 135. Lewis apparently invested more time in refining his religious poems than others. In a letter to Greeves dated August 28, 1930, less than a year before his conversion to Christianity, he wrote: “It is a very remarkable thing that in the few religious lyrics which I have written during the last year, in which I had no idea of publication & at first very little idea even of showing them to friends, I have found myself impelled to take infinitely more pains, less ready to be contented with the fairly good and more determined to reach the best attainable, than ever I was in the days when I never wrote without the ardent hope of successful publication” (TST, 385). In the “Introduction” to Collected Poems Hooper adds Lewis did not revise his prose very much, but his poems “went through endless revisions, the best examples of which are the religious lyrics of 1930, which he was still revising up to the time he died” (p. xvi). BIBLIOGRAPHY Christopher, Joe R. “An Analysis of ‘The Apologist’s Evening Prayer.’” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 5 (October 1974): 2–4. ———. “An Analysis of ‘Old Poets Remembered.’” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 19 (Fall 1995): 16–18. ———. “C. S. Lewis’ Lingusitic [sic] Myth.” Mythlore 21 (Summer 1995): 41–50. ———. “C. S. Lewis, Love Poet.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (Fall 1989): 161–173. ———. “C. S. Lewis’s Poems to Joy Davidman.” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 94 (Autumn 1998): 20–37. ———. “A Theological Triolet.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 2 (September 1971): 4–5. Fear No More: A Book of Poems for the Present Time by Living English Poets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. Hardie, A. M. and K. C. Douglas. Augury: An Oxford Miscellany of Verse and Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1940. Howard, Tom. “Poems: A Review.” Christianity Today 9 (June 18, 1965): 30. Huttar, Charles. “A Lifelong Love Affair with Language: C. S. Lewis’s Poetry.” In Word and Story in C. S. Lewis. Edited by Peter Schakel and Charles Huttar. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991, 86–108. Kawano, Roland. “C. S. Lewis’s Early Poems.” The Living Church 186 (February 13, 1983): 9–10. ———. “C. S. Lewis: Public Poet.” Mythlore 9 (Autumn 1982): 20–21. King, Don W. “A Bibliographic Review of C. S. Lewis as Poet: 1952–1995, Part One.” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 91 (Spring 1997): 9–23. ———. “A Bibliographic Review of C. S. Lewis as Poet: 1952–1995, Part Two.” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 91 (Autumn 1997): 34–56.

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———. C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001. ———. “C. S. Lewis’s Spirits in Bondage: World I Poet as Frustrated Dualist.” The Christian Scholar’s Review 27 (Summer 1998): 454–474. ———. “C. S. Lewis’ ‘The Quest of Bleheris’ as Prose Poetry.” The LampPost of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 23(1) (Spring 1999): 3–15. ———. “The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis” and “Poems.” In The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. ———.“The Distant Voice in C. S. Lewis’s Poems.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22 (Fall 1989): 175–184. ———. “Glints of Light: The Unpublished Short Poetry of C. S. Lewis.” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 15 (1998): 73–96. ———. “A Grief Observed as Free Verse.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 32 (March 2001): 1–7. ———. “The Poetry of Prose: C. S. Lewis, Ruth Pitter, and Perelandra.” Christianity and Literature 49 (Spring 2000): 331–356. ———. “The Religious Verse of C. S. Lewis: Part One.” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 97 (Spring 2000): 12–27; “Part Two.” The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal 98 (Fall 2000): 41–54. ———. “Making the Poor Best of Dull Things: C. S. Lewis as Poet.” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 12 (1995): 79–92. Kirkpatrick, John. “Fresh Views of Humankind in Lewis’s Poems.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 10 (September 1979): 1–7. Landrum, David. “Pindar, Prodigality, and Paganism: Natural Law Ethics in the Poetry of C. S. Lewis.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society 19 (Summer 1995): 4–13. Lewis, C. S. The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Fount, 1994. ———. The Pilgrim’s Regress. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1933. ———. Poems. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, 1955. Lindskoog, Kathryn. Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. Chicago, IL: Cornerstone Press, 1995. ———. “Getting It Together: Lewis and the Two Hemispheres of Knowing.” Journal of Psychology and Theology 3 (Fall 1975): 290–293. Reprinted in Mythlore 6 (Winter 1979): 43–45. Also revised and published as “Appendix Two” in Finding the Landlord. Prothero, James. “Lewis’s Poetry: A Preliminary Exploration.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 25 (March-April 1994): 1–6.

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Robson, W. W. “The Poetry of C. S. Lewis.” The Chesterton Review 17(iii–iv) (August– November, 1991): 437–443. Also see his essay “The Romanticism of C. S Lewis.” Cambridge Quarterly 1 (Summer 1966): 252–272. Reprinted in W. W. Robson. Critical Essays. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Shaw, Luci. “Looking Back to Eden: The Poetry of C. S. Lewis.” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. 23 (February 1992): 1–7. Reprinted in Radix 21(iii) (1993): 12–15, 30.

Index

“Abecedarium Philosophicum” (Lewis, C. S.), 260–61 The Abolition of Man (Lewis, C. S.): deviltry and, 54; moral values regarding, 55–56; science/magic and, 64; “Shoddy Lands” and, 159 Adolescence, 1–2 “After Ten Years” (attributed to Lewis, C. S.), 164, 166–67 “Alexandrines” (Lewis, C. S.), 240–41 The Allegory of Love (Lewis, C. S.), 67, 68, 293 All Hallows’ Eve (Williams), 158–59 Allusions: in Chronicles of Narnia, 82–86; definition of, 82; in The Horse and His Boy, 84–85; in The Last Battle, 85–86; in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 83; in The Magician’s Nephew, 85; in Prince Caspian, 83; in The Silver Chair, 84; Spirits in Bondage and, 254 n.15; in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 83–84 “An Expostulation (against too many writers of science fiction)” (Lewis, C. S.), 262

Angels: eldils and, 21–22, 36; The Pilgrims Regress and, 286; poetry, religious, and, 290 Animal pain, 94–96 Anthropocentrism: Aquinas and, 96–97; The Problem of Pain and, 94–96 “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer” (Lewis, C. S.), 289 “Apology” (Lewis, C. S.), 237–38 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 96–97 Aslan: as key figure, 72; in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 75–76; World of, 121 “As the Ruin Falls” (Lewis, C. S.), 278 Atheism, 239 Authors, 1–2, 79 Avarice, 59 “Awake, My Lute” (Lewis, C. S.), 260–61, 297 n.6 Barfield, Owen: chronological snobbery and, 180; Dymer (Lewis, C. S.) and, 228; “The Man Born Blind” and, 165 Baynes, Pauline D., 116 Beauty, 250–52 “Because of Endless Pride” (Lewis, C. S.), 283, 304 n.81

314

Betrayal, 60 Biography, 79 Bodleian Library, 161 Boswell, James, 82 Buchan, John, 3 Byron, Lord, 230 n.25 Callinicus (Haldane), 16 Carnal desire, 58–59 Carroll, Lewis, 260–61 Cartography. See Map(s), Narnia Characters: The Dark Tower, 169; intriguing, 81; Out of the Silent Planet and, 26, 29–30; Perelandra and, 35–36; Till We Have Faces, 141–43; wicked, 100–103. See also Dymer; Orual; Ransom; Studdock, Jane; Studdock, Mark Chastity, 193 Childhood, 1–2 Children’s literature, 71–72, 89 Christ, 42–44, 279, 290–92 “Christian Apologetics” (Lewis, C. S.), 138 Christianity: angels depiction in, 21–22; dark forces and, 36; environmental ethics and, 96–98; Evolutionism opposite, 15; fairy-tale and, 4–5; imagination and, 8–9; joy and, 252; medieval backdrop and, 44–48; myth and, 5; Out of the Silent Planet symbolism and, 19; Perelandra/ theology and, 36–39, 41–43; Ransom trilogy and, 16–17. See also Mere Christianity; The Pilgrim’s Regress; Poetry, religious; The Screwtape Letters Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis, C. S.): allusions used in, 82–86; anthropomorphic images in, 125–26; Aslan’s World and, 121; children’s literature and, 89; college curriculum/scholarly articles and, 91; compass rose in, 126; dictatorship in,

r Index

106; four elements of nature in, 125; harmony/justice in, 107–9; hierarchy in, 99–100; iconography in, 123–25; inspiration for/origin of, 3–4; island motifs in, 122–23; landscape background in, 126–28; Lewis’s, C. S., opinions in, 93; medieval cartography regarding, 117–19; medieval travel writing in, 120–22; monarchy in, 104–5; movies and, 89–90; Narnia, nature of, in, 97–99; nonhuman perspectives in, 103–4; popularity of, 88–91; portolan charts and, 126, 132 n.51; quaternary cartography in, 124; reading order of, 73–74; reward/punishment in, 106–7; style of writing in, 78–82; themes of, 74–78; theological content and, 89; Till We Have Faces and, 137–38; time cycles and, 125; values taught in, 86–88; wicked characters in, 100–103; World’s End in, 121. See also Map(s), Narnia; specific book Chronological snobbery, 180, 263, 265 “A Clich´e Came Out of Its Cage” (Lewis, C. S.), 263–64 Conversion: to Christ, 279; Lewis’s, C. S., 13–14, 180, 279; religious, 184 “Coronation March” (Lewis, C. S.), 261–62 “The Country of the Blind” (Lewis, C. S.), 269–70 Creation, theme of, 78 Critiques: on The Dark Tower, 169; of poetry, 233–34; on Till We Have Faces, 149–51 The C. S. Lewis Hoax (Lindskoog), 162–65, 169–70, 172 Cupid/Psyche, 139–40 Dante, 44, 45 The Dark Tower (attributed to Lewis, C. S.), 164; basic plot of, 167–68; characters in/critiques on, 169;

Index

Lindskoog’s view on, 169–70; sexual content in, 168 “The Day After We Land on Mars” (Richardson), 160 “The Day with the White Mark” (Lewis, C. S.), 271–72 “Deadly Sins” (Lewis, C. S.), 293–94 Death: Dymer (the character) and, 225; mother’s, 39–40; poetry, contemplative, and, 275–76; theme of, 74, 75 “Death in Battle” (Lewis, C. S.), 250 “De Profundis” (Lewis, C. S.), 239–40, 255 n.29 Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine (Lewis, C. S.): Book I of, 210–11; Book II of, 211–12; Book III of, 212–13; Book IV of, 213; invocation in, 210; origins of, 209–10 “The Dethronement of Power” (Lewis, C. S.), 176 Devils, 54, 177–79, 200, 201 The Discarded Image (Lewis, C. S.), 22, 24–25, 117 Don Juan (Byron), 230 n.25 Downing, David C., 161, 162 Dragons, 284–85 “Dungeon Grates” (Lewis, C. S.), 249–50 Dymer (Lewis, C. S.): Don Juan compared with, 230 n.25; influences surrounding, 214, 230 n.23; Lewis’s, C. S., comments on, 213–14; Norse influence in, 214, 227–28; Siegfried related to, 214–15, 217–18; World War I memories and, 219 Dymer (the character): alienation of, 218; autonomy, quest for, of, 214–15, 218–19, 223; beast/ offspring of, 226–27; death and, 225; dreams and, 219, 220–23; gods and, 224; irresponsibility of, 219–20; killing/self-sacrifice of, 227; Magician’s tempting of, 220–22;

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murder by/flight of, 214–15; old woman v., 216–17; rebellion caused by, 218–19; reconciliation of, 220; redemption of, 223–27; self-abnegation of, 225–26; sexual encounter by, 215–16; vanity/self-indulgence of, 215, 222–23; wounding of, 223, 224 Edwards, Dr. Bruce, 74 “The Efficacy of Prayer” (Lewis, C. S.), 197, 287 Eldils, 21–22, 36 End times, theme of, 78 Environmental ethics: Aquinas and, 96–97; carnivorousness and, 107; Christianity and, 96–98; Great Ape project and, 109 n.3; harmony/justice and, 107–9; monarchy and, 104–7; Narnia, hierarchy in, and, 99–100; Narnia, nature of, and, 97–99; nonhuman perspectives and, 103–4; The Problem of Pain and, 94–96; ruling rights and, 100–103 “Epitaph” (Lewis, C. S.), 266–67, 288–89 “Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman” (Lewis, C. S.), 289 “Essence” (Lewis, C. S.), 272 Eucatastrophe, 4–5 Evil, 38–41 “Evolutionary Hymn” (Lewis, C. S.), 263 Evolutionism: Lewis’s, C. S., response to, 14–16; Stapledon and, 15, 54; in That Hideous Strength, 16, 54–55; Wells and, 14–15 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 48–49 Fairy tale, 2, 4–6 Faith, theme of, 76 Fantasy: Lewis’s, C. S., conversion and, 13–14; reality rediscovered through, 10–11; theology blended with, 20–21; Tolkien on, 4–5

316

Fear, 18–20 “Finchley Avenue” (Lewis, C. S.), 267–69 First Men in the Moon (Wells), 27 Fisher-king, 65 “Forms of Things Unknown” (attributed to Lewis, C. S.), 164, 166 The Four Loves (Lewis, C. S.): Need-love/Gift-love in, 137, 197; religious conversion and, 184; Till We Have Faces and, 136–37, 151 Fragmentary works, 157; “After Ten Years,” 164, 166–67; controversy surrounding, 164–66, 169–70, 172; The Dark Tower, 167–70; “Forms of Things Unknown,” 164, 166; “The Man Born Blind,” 164, 165; “The Most Substantial People,” 162–63; “The Quest of Bleharis,” 161–62 Fraudulent, 60 “French Nocturne” (Lewis, C. S.), 235–36 Further Up and Further In (Edwards), 74 “The Future of Forestry” (Lewis, C. S.), 269 Gift-love, 137, 141–42, 144 Gluttony, 59, 191–92 God: authority of, 285–86; glory of, 292–93; imagination and, 7; nature of, 280–81; in Spirits in Bondage, 234–35, 238–41, 255 n.33 “God in His Mercy” (Lewis, C. S.), 281–82, 303 n.75 Gods, 224 Grand Narrative, 9–10 Great Dance, 46–47 The Great Divorce (Lewis, C. S.), 53, 54 Green Lady, 37–41 Green, Roger Lancelyn, 15 Gresham, Joy Davidman, 135, 289 “Grownupness,” 80 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 28–29, 176

r Index

Haldane, J. B. S., 15–16, 29 Harmony, 107–9 Hell: circles of, 58–60; The Great Divorce and, 54; in The Pilgrim’s Regress, 281–82; Studdock, Mark, and, 57–61 Heretics, 59 “He Whom I Bow To” (Lewis, C. S.), 280 Hideous Strength (Lewis, C. S.). See That Hideous Strength Hierarchical conception: Chronicles of Narnia and, 99–100; in Miracles, 46; in Out of the Silent Planet, 25–26; in Perelandra, 45–46 The Hobbit (Tolkien), 5–6 Hooper, Walter, 82, 105; controversy surrounding, 164–66; Lewis’s, C. S., personality and, 170–71; Lewis’s, C. S., poetry and, 233, 259 Horatian satire, 261–63 The Horse and His Boy (Lewis, C. S.): allusion in, 84–85; humility theme in, 77–78; map in, 123; nonhuman perspectives in, 103–4 Humility, 68, 77–78, 190 Humor, 79–80, 178–79 “Hymn (For Boys’ Voices)” (Lewis, C. S.), 244 Hypocrisy, 183–84 “I Am Not One That Easily Flits Past in Thought” (Lewis, C. S.), 285–86, 306 n.98 Iconography, 123–25 “I Have Come Back with Victory Got” (Lewis, C. S.), 285, 305 n.94 “I Have Scraped Clean the Plateau” (Lewis, C. S.), 282–83, 303 n.80 “I Know Not, I” (Lewis, C. S.), 286, 306 n.101 Imagination: childhood regarding, 2; disciplined v. undisciplined, 7–8; God regarding, 7; poetry,

Index

contemplative, on, 275; “seeing with the heart” through, 8–9 “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages” (Lewis, C. S.), 23–24 “Impenitence” (Lewis, C. S.), 262 “Infatuation” (Lewis, C. S.), 273–75 Infernal Period, 53–54 The Inferno (Dante): circles of hell in, 58–60; grotesque images in, 61; N.I.C.E. and, 58–62; Studdock’s, Mark, descent and, 57–60 Inklings: as amateurs, 2–3; Grand Narrative regarding, 9–10; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and, 72; Out of the Silent Planet and, 14 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 236–37 “The Inner Ring” (Lewis, C. S.), 195–96 “In Prison” (Lewis, C. S.), 240 “Irish Nocturne” (Lewis, C. S.), 241–42 “Iron Will Eat the World’s Old Beauty Up” (Lewis, C. S.), 283–84, 304 n.84 Joy: Christianity and, 252; enclosed garden and, 67; Perelandra as, 37; poetry, contemplative, on, 271–72. See also Surprised by Joy “Joy” (Lewis, C. S.): nature of beauty in, 250–52; Shelley and, 251–52; writing/publishing of, 257 n.58 “Joys that Sting” (Lewis, C. S.), 277 Justice, 107–9 Juvenalian satire, 263–67 Keats, John, 242–43 Language, 80–81, 269–70 “L’Apprenti Sorcier” (Lewis, C. S.), 246 The Last Battle (Lewis, C. S.): allusion from, 85–86; dwarves’ blindness in, 102–3; end times theme in, 78; nonhuman perspectives in, 104 Last and First Men (Stapledon), 15, 54 Law of Undulation, 182, 187–88

r 317

“Legion” (Lewis, C. S.), 287–88 Le Guin, Ursula, 160; on “After Ten Years,” 166–67; on The Dark Tower, 169; on “The Shoddy Lands,” 159 Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (Lewis, C. S.), 184–85, 187 Lewis, Warren Hamilton (brother): childhood regarding, 2; Out of the Silent Planet dedication to, 13; Spirits in Bondage and, 239; on unpublished novel, 163–64 Life-Force philosophy, 194 Life of Johnson (Boswell), 82 Limbo, 58 Lindsay, David, 27–28 Lindskoog, Kathryn: “After Ten Years” and, 166–67; The C. S. Lewis Hoax and, 162–65, 169–70, 172; The Dark Tower and, 169–70; “The Man Born Blind” and, 165; “Reason” and, 301 n.56; Sleuthing C. S. Lewis and, 162 “Lines Written in a Copy of Milton’s Works” (Lewis, C. S.), 276–77 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis, C. S.): allusion from, 83; Aslan in, 75–76; death/resurrection theme in, 74, 75; Inklings opinions of, 72; nonhuman perspectives in, 103; reading order regarding, 73–74; ruling rights in, 101; values taught in, 86–88; writing of, 72 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 10 Love, 137, 141–42, 144, 197 “Love’s as Warm as Tears” (Lewis, C. S.), 294–95 “Lullaby” (Lewis, C. S.), 244 MacDonald, George, 2 Magic, 64 The Magician’s Nephew (Lewis, C. S.): allusion from, 85; creation theme in, 78; loss of innocence and, 98; monarchy in, 105; reading order

318

The Magician’s Nephew (cont.) regarding, 73–74; superiority/ inferiority in, 100–102 Malacandra, 18–19, 24, 25 Maleldil, 20–21 “The Man Born Blind” (attributed to Lewis, C. S.), 164, 165 Map(s), Narnia: anthropomorphic images and, 125–26; books containing, 130 n.7; compass rose in, 126; fantastic creatures and, 119; four elements and, 125; in The Horse and His Boy, 123; iconography in, 123–25; island motifs and, 122–23; landscape background in, 126–28; medieval cartography, 117–19, 129; portolan charts and, 126, 132 n.51; in Prince Caspian, 125, 126, 128; quaternary cartography, 124; Renaissance influence in, 125–26, 129; social/political life in, 123; symbols and, 116; time cycles and, 125; travel literature and, 120–22; verisimilitude through, 115–16 “March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-one Giants” (Lewis, C. S.), 261, 297 n.9 Marion E. Wade Center, 161 Maturity, 80 Medieval world view: astrology and, 66; Aurthurian elements and, 63–66; cartography regarding, 117–19; cosmology within, 23–25; enclosed garden and, 66–68; iconography in, 123–25; island motifs and, 122–23; magic/science and, 64; Perelandra and, 44–48; rehabilitating, 23; in That Hideous Strength, 63–68; travel writing and, 120–22 Mere Christianity (Lewis, C. S.): idol worship regarding, 182–83; Law of Undulation regarding, 182; Life-Force philosophy and, 194; pretending and, 188; reasoned

r Index

discussion and, 181; Till We Have Faces and, 138, 143–44; title origin of, 196 Merlin, 63–66 Milton, John, 48, 235, 238, 240, 243–44 “Milton Read Again (in Surrey)” (Lewis, C. S.), 243–44 “Ministering Angels” (Lewis C. S.), 159–61 Miracles (Lewis, C. S.), 46, 49 Monarchy, 104–7 Morality, 55–57, 81–82 “The Most Substantial People” (Lewis, C. S.), 162–63 Movies, 89–90 “My Heart Is Empty” (Lewis, C. S.), 281, 302 n.72 Myth: characteristics of, 139; childhood regarding, 2; Christianity and, 5; Cupid/Psyche, 139–40; Grand Narrative and, 9; Lewis’s, C. S., life and, 138–39; reality rediscovered through, 10–11; Till We Have Faces and, 138–41, 142–43; Tolkien on, 4–5 Mythopoeia, 9 “My Time Is My Own,” 193 National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.): circles of hell related to, 58–60; destruction of, 61–62; The Inferno and, 58–62; “wheels within wheels” at, 54–55, 57; “wickedness in high places” and, 53 “The Nativity” (Lewis, C. S.), 292 Naturalism, 10 Natvilcius, origin of, 36 “Nearly They Stood Who Fall” (Lewis, C. S.), 282, 303 n.77 Need-love, 137, 141–42, 144 N.I.C.E. See National Institute of Coordinated Experiments “Night” (Lewis, C. S.), 242–43

Index

Nihilism, 272–73 “No Beauty We Could Desire” (Lewis, C. S.), 288 “Noon’s Intensity” (Lewis, C. S.), 292–93 Obsession, 273–75 “Odora Canum Vis (A defense of certain modern biographers and critics)” (Lewis, C. S.), 262 “Old Poets Remembered” (Lewis, C. S.), 277 “On Being Angels” (Lewis, C. S.), 290 “Once the Worm-laid Egg Broke in the Wood” (Lewis, C. S.), 284–85, 305 n.91 “On the Death of Charles Williams” (Lewis, C. S.), 275–76 “On Fairy-Stories” (Tolkien), 4–5 “On Science Fiction” (Lewis, C. S.), 263 “On a Vulgar Error” (Lewis, C. S.), 265 Orual: conflicts concerning, 143–44; critiques regarding, 149–51; divine relationship and, 152–53; plot regarding, 141–42; renunciation and, 147–48; as role model, 152; self-knowledge and, 145–47; transformation of, 148–49 “Our Daily Bread” (Lewis, C. S.), 244–45 Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis, C. S.): angels portrayal in, 21–22; character sources concerning, 29–30; Christian symbolism in, 19; dedication in, 13; Evolutionism and, 15; fantasy/theology blended in, 20–21; fears and, 18–20; First Men in the Moon and, 27; hierarchical conception in, 25–26; Lewis, C. S., as character in, 26; Lindsay’s influence regarding, 27–28; Maleldil, meaning regarding, 20–21; medieval cosmology within, 24–25; “other” point of view and, 176; plot of,

r 319

17–20; publishing of, 14; Ransom’s description in, 17; reviews regarding, 14; Swift’s influence regarding, 28–29; utopia and, 25 “Oxford” (Lewis, C. S.), 248, 249 Oyarsa, 20, 21 Paganism, 263–64 Paradise Lost (Milton), 48; “Apology” and, 238; “Milton Read Again (in Surrey)” and, 243–44; Spirits in Bondage and, 235, 238, 240 “Passing To-day by a Cottage, I Shed Tears” (Lewis, C. S.), 286, 306 n.100 Paul, Apostle, 8–9 Pendragon, 65 Percival, 65–66 Perelandra (Lewis, C. S.), 53; blurring of fact/fiction in, 35–36; Christ and, 42–44; control v. surrender in, 39–40; eldils in, 36; evil, nature of, in, 38–41; Great Dance in, 46–47; hierarchy regarding, 45–46; joy and, 37; Lewis, C. S., as character in, 35–36; literary influences in, 48–49; medieval Christian backdrop of, 44–48; plot of, 35–38, 40–43, 47–48; Purgatorio and, 44, 45; self-will and, 37, 40–44; theology in, 36–39, 41–43; The Time Machine and, 49 Personality, Lewis’s, C. S., 170–71 Phantastes (MacDonald), 2 The Pilgrim’s Regress (Lewis, C. S.): angels and, 286; “Because of Endless Pride” in, 283, 304 n.81; conversion regarding, 279; dragons and, 284–85; God in, 280–81, 285–86; “God in His Mercy” in, 281–82, 303 n.75; Hell/Satan in, 281–82; “He Whom I Bow To” in, 280; “I Am Not One That Easily Flits Past in Thought” in, 285–86, 306 n.98; “I Have Come Back with Victory Got” in, 285, 305

320

The Pilgrim’s Regress (cont.) n.94; “I Have Scraped Clean the Plateau” in, 282–83, 303 n.80; “I Know Not, I” in, 286, 306 n.101; “Iron Will Eat the World’s Old Beauty Up” in, 283–84, 304 n.84; man’s dignity and, 286; “My Heart Is Empty” in, 281, 302 n.72; “Nearly They Stood Who Fall” in, 282, 303 n.77; “Once the Worm-laid Egg Broke in the Wood” in, 284–85, 305 n.91; “Passing To-day by a Cottage, I Shed Tears” in, 286, 306 n.100; progress, human/modern, and, 283–84; “Quick!” in, 284, 304 n.87; sexual temptation and, 284; spiritual pride and, 282–83; “Thou Only Art Alternative to God” in, 281, 302 n.74; “When Lilith Means to Draw Me” in, 284, 305 n.90; “You Rest Upon Me All My Days” in, 280–81, 302 n.71 Poetry: critiques of, 233–34; Lewis’s, C. S., evolution regarding, 295–96, 309 n.135; Lewis’s, C. S., passion for, 234; World War I, 235. See also The Pilgrim’s Regress; Poetry, comic; Poetry, contemplative; Poetry, narrative; Poetry, preconversion; Poetry, religious; Poetry, satiric; Spirits in Bondage Poetry, comic, 267; “Abecedarium Philosophicum,” 260–61; “Awake, My Lute,” 260–61, 297 n.6; introduction to, 259; “March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-one Giants,” 261, 297 n.9; nonsense verse and, 260–61; rhythm and, 261–62, 297 n.6; “The Small Man Orders His Wedding” (Lewis, C. S.), 261 Poetry, contemplative: “As the Ruin Falls,” 278; “The Country of the Blind,” 269–70; “The Day with the White Mark,” 271–72; death and,

r Index

275–76; environmentalism and, 269; “Essence,” 272; “Finchley Avenue,” 267–69; friendship, lost, and, 276–77; “The Future of Forestry,” 269; on human condition, 270–79; imagination/reason and, 275; “Infatuation,” 273–75; introduction to, 259; joy and, 271–72; “Joys that Sting,” 277; language/meaning and, 269–70; “Lines Written in a Copy of Milton’s Works,” 276–77; love, loss of, and, 278; on modern life, 267–70, 278; nihilism in, 272–73; obsession and, 273–75; “Old Poets Remembered,” 277; “On the Death of Charles Williams,” 275–76; “Re-Adjustment,” 270; “Reason,” 275, 301 n.56; “The Salamander,” 272–73; suburban life and, 267–69; suffering and, 277; “Sweet Desire,” 270–71, 300 n.40; thought/will and, 272 Poetry, narrative: Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine, 209–13; Dymer (Lewis, C. S.), 213–28; other surviving, 228 n.1 Poetry, preconversion: critiques of, 233–34; Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine, 209–13; Dymer (Lewis, C. S.), 213–28; “Joy,” 250–52; Lewis’s, C. S., theological dilemma, and, 228; origins of, 209; power of, 213; reflections on, 252–53. See also Spirits in Bondage Poetry, religious, 279–95; angels and, 290; “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” 289; biblical narrative and, 289–90; “Deadly Sins,” 293–94; “The Efficacy of Prayer,” 197, 287; “Epitaph,” 288–89; “Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman,” 289; glory, God’s, and, 292–93; introduction to, 259, 279; “Legion,” 287–88; Lewis’s, C. S., evolution regarding, 295–96,

Index

309 n.135; “Love’s as Warm as Tears,” 294–95; nativity, Christ’s, and, 290–92; “The Nativity,” 292; “No Beauty We Could Desire,” 288; “Noon’s Intensity,” 292–93; “On Being Angels,” 290; prayer, subject of, and, 287–89; “The Sailing of the Ark,” 289; sins, seven deadly, and, 293–94; “Sonnet,” 287; “Stephen to Lazarus,” 290; “They Tell Me, Lord,” 287; “The Turn of the Tide,” 290–92. See also The Pilgrim’s Regress Poetry, satiric: chronological snobbery and, 263, 265; “A Clich´e Came Out of Its Cage,” 263–64; “Coronation March,” 261–62; democracy and, 266–67; “Epitaph,” 266–67; “Evolutionary Hymn,” 263; “An Expostulation (against too many writers of science fiction),” 262; Horatian satire in, 261–63; “Impenitence,” 262; introduction to, 259; Juvenalian satire in, 263–67; modern poetry and, 265–66; “Odora Canum Vis (A defense of certain modern biographers and critics),” 262; “On a Vulgar Error,” 265; paganism and, 263–64; “Prelude to Space: An Epithalamium,” 264; science fiction and, 262–63; space travel and, 264–65; “Spartan Nactus,” 265–66; writers, superficial, and, 264 Portolan charts, 126, 132 n.51 Possible Worlds (Haldane), 15, 16 Posthumous works. See Unpublished works Prayer, 184–85, 187, 197–98, 287–89 “Prelude to Space: An Epithalamium” (Lewis, C. S.), 264 Pride, 195–96, 282–83, 304 n.81 Prince Caspian (Lewis, C. S.): allusion from, 83; faith theme in, 76; harmony/justice in, 107–9; human/nonhuman relationship in,

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94; landscape background in, 128; map in, 125–26, 128; monarchy in, 105; “other” point of view and, 176; portolan charts and, 126, 132 n.51; William the Conqueror regarding, 112 n.64 The Problem of Pain (Lewis, C. S.), 94–96 Prodigals, 59 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 239 Protagonist, 3 Psyche/Cupid, 139–40 Purgatorio (Dante), 44, 45 “The Quest of Bleharis” (Lewis, C. S.), 161–62 “Quick!” (Lewis, C. S.), 284, 304 n.87 Ransom (the character): Christ and, 44; conquest of self by, 43–44; fear and, 18–20; as pendragon/fisher-king, 65; as resembling Lewis, C. S., 17; self-will and, 37, 40–44; Tolkien and, 29; two-toned body of, 37–38, 41–42 Ransom trilogy: Christian perspective and, 16–17; Evolutionism and, 14–16; hierarchical conception within, 25–26; medieval cosmology within, 23–25. See also Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; Ransom; That Hideous Strength “Re-Adjustment” (Lewis, C. S.), 270 Reality, 10–11 “Reason” (Lewis, C. S.), 275, 301 n.56 Renaissance, 23, 117, 125–26, 129 Renewal, theme of, 76–77 Renunciation, 147–48 Repentance, 189–90 Resurrection, theme of, 74, 75 Revelation, 8–9 Richardson, Dr. Robert S., 160 The Ring of Nibelung (Wagner), 209–10 “The Roads” (Lewis, C. S.), 242

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Sadism, 171 “The Sailing of the Ark” (Lewis, C. S.), 289 “The Salamander” (Lewis, C. S.), 272–73 Satan, 238–39, 281–82 “Satan Speaks” (Lewis, C. S.), 238–39 “The Satyr” (Lewis, C. S.), 245–46 Science, 64 Science Fiction, 262–63. See also Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; Ransom; Ransom trilogy; That Hideous Strength The Screwtape Letters (Lewis, C. S.), 53; chastity, subject of, in, 193; Christian influence and, 193–96; church shopping and, 191; concealment and, 186; danger, subject of, in, 200; devils regarding, 177–79, 200, 201; double standard/hypocrisy and, 183–84; factions and, 186–87; fatigue, subject of, in, 200; future focus and, 191; gluttony, subject of, in, 191–92; gradualness, subject of, in, 188, 189; humility, subject of, in, 190; humor and, 178–79; idea for, 175–76; idol worship and, 182–83; intention in writing, 178–79; laughter, kinds of, and, 189; Law of Undulation in, 182, 187–88; Life-Force philosophy in, 194; love, subject of, in, 192–93; malice/benevolence, subject of, in, 185–86; “My Time Is My Own” and, 193; “other” point of view and, 176–77; popularity of, 175; prayer, subject of, in, 184–85, 197–98; pride, spiritual, and, 195–96; reading/argument and, 180–81; reality, subject of, in, 201; repentance, subject of, in, 189–90; reviews regarding, 202–3; sexual temptation and, 192; Tolkien and, 179; unbelievers and, 188–89; unselfishness and, 196–97; war,

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subject of, in, 185; Wormwood’s defeats in, 198, 201–2; writing of, 202 Scripture, theme of, 77 “Seeing with the Heart,” 8–9 Self-knowledge, 145–47 Sex, 168, 192, 215–16, 284 Shaw, George Bernard, 194 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 239, 251–52 “The Shoddy Lands” (Lewis C. S.), 158–59 Short stories, 157; controversy surrounding, 164–66, 169–70, 172; “Ministering Angels,” 159–61; as misogynistic, 159, 160; “The Shoddy Lands,” 158–59 Siegfried (Wagner), 214–15, 217–18 The Silver Chair (Lewis, C. S.): allusion from, 84; landscape background in, 128; quaternary cartography in, 124–25; scripture theme in, 77 Sins, seven deadly, 293–94 Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (Lindskoog), 162 “The Small Man Orders His Wedding” (Lewis, C. S.), 261 “Song of the Pilgrims” (Lewis, C. S.), 245–47 “Sonnet” (Lewis, C. S.), 287 “Spartan Nactus” (Lewis, C. S.), 265–66 Spenser, Edmund, 48–49 “Spirit” (Lewis, C. S.), 248–49 Spirits in Bondage (Lewis, C. S.), 209, 228; “Alexandrines” in, 240–41; allusion and, 254 n.15; “Apology” in, 237–38; atheism in, 239; “Death in Battle” in, 250; “De Profundis” in, 239–40, 255 n.29; “Dungeon Grates” in, 249–50; faery focus within, 234, 245–50, 256 n.49; “French Nocturne” in, 235–36; God in, 234–35, 238–41, 255 n.33; “Hymn (For Boys’ Voices)” in, 244; “In Prison” in, 240; “Irish Nocturne” in, 241–42; “L’Apprenti Sorcier” in,

Index

246; Lewis’s, C. S., dualism in, 241, 255 n.28; Lewis, Warren Hamilton, and, 239; “Lullaby” in, 244; Matter=Nature=Satan regarding, 238; Milton and, 235, 238, 240, 243–44; “Milton Read Again (in Surrey)” in, 243–44; nature of poems within, 234–35; “Night” in, 242–43; “Our Daily Bread” in, 244–45; “Oxford” in, 248–49; prologue of, 235; reflections on, 252–53; “The Roads” in, 242; sanguine poems within, 234–35, 241–50; “Satan Speaks” in, 238–39; “The Satyr” in, 245–46; “Song of the Pilgrims” in, 245–47; “Spirit” in, 248–49; “Spooks” in, 237; “To Sleep” in, 242, 243; “Victory” in, 236–37; war poems within, 234–38, 248–50; “Worlds Desire” in, 248 “Spooks” (Lewis, C. S.), 237 Stapledon, Olaf, 15, 54 Star Maker (Stapledon), 54 “Stephen to Lazarus” (Lewis, C. S.), 290 Studdock, Jane, 62–63, 65–68 Studdock, Mark: circles of hell related to, 58–60; compared with Studdock, Jane, 62–63; enclosed garden and, 67; escape of, 60–61; hell descent of, 57–61; humility of, 68; inner ring and, 57 Studies in Words (Lewis, C. S.), 80–81, 151 Style of writing: authorial intrusion and, 79; characters and, 81; humor and, 79–80; language and, 80–81; maturity/“grownupness” and, 80; moral teachings and, 81–82 Suffering, 277 Sullen, 59 Surprised by Joy (Lewis, C. S.): on childhood influences, 1–2; conversion journey and, 180, 279; exclusionary group and, 195;

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joy/sehnsucht and, 136; mother’s death and, 39–40; Till We Have Faces and, 135–36; Wells and, 27 “Sweet Desire” (Lewis, C. S.), 270–71, 300 n.40 Swift, Jonathan, 28–29, 176 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 236–37, 244 That Hideous Strength (Lewis, C. S.): astrology and, 66; Aurthurian elements in, 63–66; Avalon and, 66; circles of hell related to, 58–60; enclosed garden and, 66–68; Evolutionism and, 16, 54–55; God’s glory in, 293; The Inferno and, 58–61; medievalism in, 63–68; Merlin in, 63–65; moral values and, 55–57; pendragon/fisher-king and, 65; plot of, 53–55, 57–62, 64–65, 67–68; Studdocks compared and, 62–63, 67–68; Till We Have Faces and, 138. See also National Institute of Coordinated Experiments; Studdock, Jane; Studdock, Mark Themes, Narnia, 74–78 Theology: fantasy blended with, 20–21; in Perelandra, 36–39, 41–43 “They Tell Me, Lord” (Lewis, C. S.), 287 The Thirty-Nine Steps (Buchan), 3 “Thou Only Art Alternative to God” (Lewis, C. S.), 281, 302 n.74 Till We Have Faces (Lewis, C. S.): characters in, 141–43; conflicts present within, 143–44; context of, 135–38; critiques, body of, on, 149–51; Cupid/Psyche myth and, 139–40; endurance/reality of, 152–53; Gresham’s influence on, 135; initial seeds of, 135–36; myth/legend characters in, 142–43; myth regarding, 138–43; A Myth Retold and, 140–41; Narnia compared with, 137–38; Need-love/Gift-love in, 137,

324

Till We Have Faces (cont.) 141–42, 144, 197; plot of, 141–42; renunciation in, 147–48; resolution of, 145–49; self-knowledge/discovery in, 145–47; title page epigraph of, 151; transformation in, 148–49; trichotomy options and, 138 The Time Machine (Wells), 49 Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Hobbit and, 5–6; lecture “On Fairy-Stories” and, 4–5; Lewis’s, C. S., conversion and, 180; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and, 72; Lord of the Rings and, 10; popular literature/genres and, 3; Ransom and, 29; The Screwtape Letters and, 179; space story/time story and, 14; subcreation theory of, 115–16 “To Sleep” (Lewis, C. S.), 242–43 Transcendent, 5–6, 250–51 “The Turn of the Tide” (Lewis, C. S.), 290–92

r Index

Villains, 54 Violent, 60 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Lewis, C. S.): allusion from, 83–84; island motifs in, 122–23; medieval travel writing in, 120; portolan charts and, 126, 132 n.51; quaternary cartography in, 124; redemption in, 102; renewal theme in, 76–77 Voyage to Arcturus (Lindsay), 27–28

Undulation, Law of, 182, 187–88 Unpublished works, 157; “After Ten Years,” 164, 166–67; controversy surrounding, 164–66, 169–70, 172; The Dark Tower, 167–70; “Forms of Things Unknown,” 164, 166; Lewis, Warren Hamilton, on, 163–64; “The Man Born Blind,” 164, 165; “The Most Substantial People,” 162–63; “The Quest of Bleharis,” 161–62

Wagner, Richard: Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine and, 209–10; Dymer (Lewis, C. S.) and, 214–15, 217–18; Lewis’s, C. S., essay on, 229 n.4 Walsh, Chad, 64 War: poems, 234–38, 248–50; The Screwtape Letters and, 185; World War I and, 219, 235 “The Weight of Glory” (Lewis, C. S.), 196–97 Weldon, T. D., 29–30 Wells, H. G., 14–15, 26–27, 49 Westonism, 15 “When Lilith Means to Draw Me” (Lewis, C. S.), 284, 305 n.90 Williams, Charles, 65, 158–59, 275–76 Wilson, A. N., 170–71 Wordsworth, William, 245 “Worlds Desire” (Lewis, C. S.), 248 Wrathful, 59 Writers, 1–2

Values, 55–57 “Victory” (Lewis, C. S.), 236–37

“You Rest Upon Me All My Days” (Lewis, C. S.), 280–81, 302 n.71

About the Editor and Contributors

THE EDITOR BRUCE L. EDWARDS is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Distance Education and International Programs at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he has been a faculty member and administrator since 1981. He has published several books on Lewis, most recently, Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual World of Narnia (Tyndale, 2005) and Further Up and Further in: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Broadman and Holman, 2005). These are volumes in addition to two scholarly works, A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy and The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. For many years he has maintained a popular Web site on the life and works of C. S. Lewis (http://www.pseudobook.com/cslewis). During his academic career he has served as Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya (1999–2000), a Bradley Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC (1989–1990), and as the S. W. Brooks Memorial Professor of Literature at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1988). Edwards is also a Fulbright-Hays Grant Recipient to Tanzania (2005). Bruce and his wife, Joan, live in Bowling Green, Ohio. Edwards is General Editor of this four-volume reference set on C. S. Lewis. THE CONTRIBUTORS DEVIN BROWN is Professor of English at Asbury College. He earned his Master’s Degree from the University of Florida’s creative writing program and

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his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. As a Lilly Scholar, he has presented papers on Lewis and Tolkien at scholarly conferences in the United States as well as in London and Oxford, and has written numerous articles on these two writers for professional journals. His books include Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Baker Books, 2005) and Not Exactly Normal (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2005). Not Exactly Normal was recently put on Bank Street College’s list of Best Children’s Books of the Year (2006). In 2005, Devin was given the Francis White Ewbank Award for Teaching Excellence, Asbury College’s highest honor. ´ MARGARITA CARRETERO-GONZ ALEZ is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the English and German Department of the University of Granada (Spain). In 1996, she completed her doctoral thesis on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Her current research interests include fantasy, utopia, children’s literature, women’s fiction, and ecocriticism as a tool for literary analysis, which combine two of her great passions: literature and environmentalism. In 1998 she and her colleague Encarnaci´on Hidalgo-Tenorio, organized an international conference to commemorate the birth centenary of C. S. Lewis. Celebrated in Granada, the conference had Walter Hooper and Colin Duriez as experts on Lewis. A commemorative book anthologizing selected presentations from that conference was published by Peter Lang in January 2001, under the title Behind the Veil of Familiarity: C. S. Lewis (1898–1998). DAVID C. DOWNING is R. W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He has written numerous articles on C. S. Lewis, and his Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (University of Massachusetts Press) was named as one of the five best books yet published on Lewis by the “C. S. Lewis and the Inklings Homepage.” His The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith was named one of Booklist’s Best Religion Books for 2002 and was a 2003 ECPA Gold Medallion finalist. Downing was also awarded the Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant for 2000 by the Marion E. Wade Center in support of his research. His book, Into the Region of Awe (Inter Varsity Press) was listed by Christianity Today as one of the top ten best new books on C. S. Lewis. KATHERINE HARPER is a writer and literary scholar based in northeast Ohio. She is a graduate of the College of Wooster and Bowling Green State University and has contributed to seven reference books to date. Her current project is a full-length critical biography of once-prominent American humor writer, Ellis Parker Butler.

About the Editor and Contributors

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MARVIN D. HINTEN is Professor of English at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. Like C. S. Lewis, his specialization is British Renaissance literature. He earned his Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University (Ohio) in 1993. Hinten is the author of six books and also a contributing editor to The Lamp-Post, a C. S. Lewis journal. DON W. KING has served on the faculty of Montreat College since 1974 in various capacities, including Professor of English, Dean of Arts and Science, and Interim President. He serves as Editor of the Christian Scholar’s Review, and has published articles in Books & Culture, The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal, Christianity and Literature, CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Christian Scholar’s Review, The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society, Mythlore, SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, and has contributed articles on Lewis’s poetry to The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. King is also author of C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent State University Press, 2001). His book-length manuscript on British poet Ruth Pitter, Hunting the Unicorn: A Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter, will be published by Kent State University Press in Spring 2008. He is currently researching and writing a manuscript on the life, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of the wife of C. S. Lewis, Joy Davidman, tentatively entitled Yet One More Spring: A Critical Study of Joy Davidman Gresham. MARTA GARC´IA DE LA PUERTA is Professor of English at the University of Vigo (Spain). She earned her doctorate in English Philology with a thesis on C. S. Lewis titled “C. S. Lewis: un autor de literatura fant´astica. An´alisis de sus mundos secundarios” (2000), published under the title: La literatura fant´astica de C. S. Lewis (2005). She has also published and contributed several chapters and essays on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and children’s fantasy literature to various monographs, journals, and magazines. KAREN ROWE is professor of English at Bob Jones University where she has taught undergraduate composition and literature classes for almost twenty years. She has a B.A. in English and a M.Ed. in Teaching English from Bob Jones University and a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Rhetoric and Writing from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Her dissertation identified the inscriptions on the frames of Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt’s paintings as explanatory rhetoric.

C. S. LEWIS Life, Works, and Legacy

C. S. LEWIS Life, Works, and Legacy Volume 3: Apologist, Philosopher, and Theologian

Edited by Bruce L. Edwards

PRAEGER PERSPECTIVES

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data C.S. Lewis : life, works, and legacy / edited by Bruce L. Edwards. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–99116–4 (set : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99117–2 (v. 1 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99118–0 (v. 2 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99119–9 (v. 3 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–275–99120–2 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963—Criticism and interpretation. I. Edwards, Bruce L. PR6023.E926Z597 2007 823
.912–dc22 2006100486 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. C 2007 by Bruce L. Edwards Copyright 

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006100486 ISBN-10: 0–275–99116–4 (set) ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99116–6 0–275–99117–2 (Vol. 1) 978–0–275–99117–3 0–275–99118–0 (Vol. 2) 978–0–275–99118–0 0–275–99119–9 (Vol. 3) 978–0–275–99119–7 0–275–99120–2 (Vol. 4) 978–0–275–99120–3 First published in 2007 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This work is dedicated to my son, Justin Robert Edwards. Justin’s passion for life and for the life to come, his creativity and excellence in music and movie-making, his faith and resilience in the face of this world’s challenges, all inspire and amaze me, and bless everyone who knows him.

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface 1 The Ecumenical Apologist: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Christianity Victor Reppert

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2 C. S. Lewis as Allegorist: The Pilgrim’s Regress Mona Dunckel

29

3 Mere Christianity: Uncommon Truth in Common Language Joel D. Heck

51

4 The Sermons of C. S. Lewis: The Oxford Don as Preacher Greg M. Anderson

75

5 The Abolition of Man: C. S. Lewis’s Philosophy of History Michael Travers

107

6 The Great Divorce: Journey to Heaven and Hell Wayne Martindale

133

7 Miracles: C. S. Lewis’s Critique of Naturalism Victor Reppert

153

8 Stealing Past the Watchful Dragons: C. S. Lewis’s Incarnational Aesthetics and Today’s Emerging Imagination Philip Harrold

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9 Letters to Malcolm: C. S. Lewis on Prayer Marjorie Lamp Mead

209

10 An Apologist’s Evening Prayer: Reflecting on C. S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms Donald T. Williams

237

11 Understanding C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy: “A Most Reluctant” Autobiography Mona Dunckel and Karen Rowe

257

12 “Gifted Amateurs”: C. S. Lewis and the Inklings David Bratman

279

Index

321

About the Editor and Contributors

333

Acknowledgments

The genesis of this four-volume reference set is the kind invitation I received from Suzanne Staszak-Silva of Greenwood Publishing Group in late Spring, 2005, asking me to consider creating a reference work that would comprehensively deal with the life and work of C. S. Lewis. As it was the case that I was almost literally heading out the door to Tanzania on a Fulbright-Hays Grant, we did not get to consider the project in much detail until the end of the summer when, with the help of my literary agent, Matt Jacobson, we cheerfully exchanged ideas with Suzanne that have led to the expansive volumes you now hold in your hands. Suzanne and all the capable editors and reviewers at Greenwood have been terrific to work with, and I am once again grateful to Matt Jacobson of the Loyal Arts Literary Agency for his expertise and wise counsel. No project of this kind can, in fact, come to fruition without the help of many hands. I want to start with the contributors to this volume and the breadth and depth of C. S. Lewis scholarship they represent. Each of them, especially those contributing more than one essay, have cheerfully met my prescribed deadlines and offered both incisive and learned commentary on the topics for which they were chosen. I want to offer special thanks to busy and illustrious Lewisian colleagues and scholars, David Downing, Diana Glyer, David Bratman, Don King, Marvin Hinten, Lyle Dorsett, Colin Duriez, Victor Reppert, Devin Brown, Wayne Martindale, and Marjorie Lamp Mead, for making and taking the time to contribute their unique vantage points to this collection. Their knowledge of the Lewis canon continues to provide us with fresh insights into his legacy. The exciting thing about this particular collection, however, is not only the opportunity to recruit the already renowned scholars listed above, but also to attract new talent and younger scholars who

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bring their own generational insights into the issues and contexts many of us have been sifting for years. Walter Hooper has been unfailingly kind in his support of this project, helping me arrange access to some special collections at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Of course, Lewis scholars everywhere are in his debt for decades of indefatigable efforts to make the letters and papers of C. S. Lewis available to the public. Likewise, Christopher Mitchell, Director, and his staff, at the Marion C. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, continue to operate the most outstanding resource center on C. S. Lewis and the Inklings in North America. I treasure every moment I get to spend in the beautiful Wade Center’s hallowed library. Scott Calhoun, a longtime colleague and friend from Cedarville University, Ohio, answered my call for some late counsel on the disposition of the last several essays to be included for publication, and I will always be grateful for his graceful editorial touches. (The only thing missing in this collection is an essay that I am sure Scott wishes to compose on the influence of Lewis’s work on U2’s Bono. Maybe next time, Scott?) My colleagues at Bowling Green State University, especially my immediate supervisors, continue to be generous in support of my research and lecturing on C. S. Lewis. They have provided me with the writing time one needs to produce a set of volumes of this magnitude. Dr. William K. Balzer, Dean of Continuing and Extended Education and Associate Vice-President, along with Dr. Linda Dobb, Executive Vice-President, made possible a Spring 2006 trip to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England, and a presentation at the “C. S. Lewis, Renaissance Man” Conference at Cambridge University that significantly affected the scope and accuracy of this work. My own staff headed by Ms. Connie Molnar, Director of Distance Education at Bowling Green State University, has indirectly made possible the efforts herein reflected, since their diligence and professionalism allowed me the freedom at crucial moments during the project to travel for research or to siphon off time for its final editing. Finally, while we were completing the last stages of this volume, my wife Joan and I were trying to finish the building of a new home. As anyone who has ever tried such a foolish and audacious thing can testify, it can make for some tense (and intense) hours. Joan has been her usual patient, kind, and thoughtful self in shouldering the burden for all sorts of decisions and contingency planning for the house, liberating me to read, write, edit, and email incessantly. In the end, her contribution to this four-volume set is equal to any I can claim. These volumes are for the “Keeping Room” shelves, Sweetie. Enjoy them!

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Since I have never left them out of any book I have published, I will not become inconsistent or ungrateful now. My children, Matthew, Tracey, Mary, Casey, Justin, and Michael always inspire me to reach higher and perform at my best. Their love and encouragement make all the difference on those dark and stormy nights when you wonder whether even one more word will come forth. Each of them is an artist or creator in their own right, with plenty of books (and songs and movies) of their own on the horizon. Michael specifically enhances this text further by contributing one of the most significant essays in Volume 4; I should have turned him loose on more topics! My father, Bruce L. Edwards, Sr., has always been steadfast in his support and encouragement for my work, and I sincerely thank him for continuing to take such good care of all of us. As does God Himself.

Preface

Scholars and admirers alike have long sought a full-fledged, balanced biocritical treatment of the life and works of C. S. Lewis. They, rightly, seek a treatise that does justice to his remarkably successful, multiple careers as a Christian apologist, science fiction and fantasy writer, literary historian, poet, cultural critic, and historian of words. Such a book will be sympathetic without being sycophantic, incisive without being sensational, and comprehensive without being copious. It will illuminate his life and times, including his interesting friendships, his composing techniques, and, of course, his personal piety. Above all, it will also help explain his enormous impact on contemporary Christianity, particularly in America, and it will set in appropriate historical context the important contribution his scholarship makes to literary culture and social and ethical discourse in philosophy and theology. Until such a book arrives, if it ever does, this current four-volume set will represent the most lucid, most dispassionate, well-informed, up-to-date, and comprehensive treatment of Lewis’s life, times, and legacy to have so far been produced, exemplifying the highest standards of historical research and employing the most responsible tools of interpretation. It has been too typical of the variety of biographies now available on Lewis for their authors to range between two extremes: (1) works furtively focused on certain presumed negative personality traits and ambiguous relationships and incidents that obscure rather than illuminate Lewis’s faith and scholarship; or (2) works so enamored of Lewis that their work borders on or exceeds hagiography and offers page after page of redundant paraphrase of his putatively unique insights. The former, despite their protestations that they

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operate out of an objectivity missing in other treatments, or out of a respect and a healthy admiration for Lewis’s “literary accomplishments,” tend to be transparently premised on a rather tendentious amateur psychoanalysis and often programmatically dismiss Lewis’s readership in order to discredit his literary and theological judgments. The latter evince the effects of the worshipful homage, exhausting readers and convincing them that Lewis is readily reducible to a few doctrines, a few genres, and, perhaps, a few penchants. Even so, enough of Lewis’s enumerable strengths usually emerge even from these biographies to reward the Lewisian enthusiast or skeptical inquirer hungry for more informed assessment of his achievements, and his continuing impact. It is the case, nevertheless, that the underlying theme of recent works, and among them I include biographies written by Britain’s A. N. Wilson and Australia’s Michael White, have been to “rescue” Lewis from the assumed cult of his evangelical idolaters, particularly in America. It is these folks who, Wilson, for one, avers in his 1991 study of Lewis, desire to create a Lewis in their own image, one they can promote as a “virginal, Bible-toting, nonsmoking, lemonade-drinking champion for Christ.” But such a stance reflects a surprising naivet´e about Lewis’s American readership and barely disguises its contempt for the esteem accorded Lewis’s scholarship, fiction, and apologetics in many diverse circles. One aim of this present reference work is thus to correct such stereotypes of both Lewis and his readership. To accomplish this, and many more worthy goals, one must offer a thorough-going, well-researched, yet also theologically sensitive treatment of Lewis’s life and times that takes into consideration not only his tumultuous upbringing but also his mature development, his successes and failures, his blind spots and prescience, his trek into and impact on both “Jerusalem and Athens” (i.e., religion and philosophy), and, the essential perspective discerning readers need to understand the key people and relationships in his life. Consequently, assembled for this volume are contributions from the finest C. S. Lewis scholars from North America and Europe. Their essays, one and all, have been solicited to be expansive, comprehensive, informed, and selfcontained prose works that contextualize each respective topic historically and deliver expository clarity to its reader. As one considers the table of contents, he or she will realize that the essays fall into four volumes slated to emphasize four distinctive areas of Lewis’s life and work. Volume 1, C. S. Lewis: An Examined Life, is explicitly biographical in its orientation and scope. Lewis’s early life, collegiate days, military service, friendships, achievements, and ongoing impact are set in historical context, starting from his Belfast birth in 1898 to his auspicious death on November 22, 1963, the day U.S. President John Kennedy was assassinated. New

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essays illuminate his relationships with J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and his beloved wife, Joy Davidman Gresham. Volume 2, C. S. Lewis: Fantasist, Mythmaker, and Poet, focuses on Lewis’s imaginative writing, foregrounding his achievements in fiction and poetry as one dimension of his notoriety and popularity worldwide. The provenance of his works and their significance in his times and ours are explored and defined capably. Volume 3, C. S. Lewis: Apologist, Philosopher, and Theologian, draws attention to the celebrity Lewis received as a Christian thinker in his radio broadcasts and subsequent renown as a defender and translator of the Christian faith among skeptics and believers alike in postwar Britain and abroad. His well-known works such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and Letters to Malcolm are given close readings and careful explication. Finally, in Volume 4, C. S. Lewis: Scholar, Teacher, and Public Intellectual, Lewis’s lesser known vocations and publications are given careful consideration and examined for the models they may provide contemporary readers and academics for responsible scholarship. This set of essays helps assess Lewis’s ongoing legacy and offers an extensive annotated bibliography of secondary sources that can guide the apprentice scholar to worthy works that will further assist him or her in extending the insights this collection presents. Within each volume, essays fall into one of three distinct categories: (1) historical, fact-based treatment of eras, events, and personages in Lewis’s life; (2) expository and literary analysis of major Lewis works of imaginative literature, literary scholarship, and apologetics; (3) global essays that seek to introduce, elucidate, and unfold the connections between and among the genres, vocations, and respective receptions elicited by Lewis in his varied career. In my original invitation letter, each essayist was told to trust his or her instincts as a scholar, and thus to be empowered to write the essay from the unique vantage point they represent from inside their discipline. Generally speaking, each kind of essay was thus written to accomplish the following: r The historical essays begin with a well-documented overview of their topic, foreshad-

owing the era, events, personages, etc., then proceed to a chronological treatment of the particulars, interspersed with connections, informed interpretations, contextualizations that illuminate the specific era covered as well as illuminating their relationships to other historical circumstances, publications, etc. When readers finish the essay, they should have at hand all the essential facts, accurately and chronologically marshaled, with a confident sense of the significance of this period, era, or relationship for Lewis’s life and work. r Exposition and analysis essays focus on single works in the Lewis canon and offer the reader a comprehensive overview of the work, including coverage of its origins and place in Lewis’s life and times, its historical meaning and contemporary significance,

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its reception among readers, scholars, academics, critics, and a reflective judgment on its enduring influence or impact. The readers of these essays will come away with a profound grasp of the value and impact of the work in itself and the reputation it creates. In cases where there may exist a range of opinions about or competing interpretations of the meaning or value of a work, the essayist articulates the varying points of view, weighing their cogency, and offering the reader an informed perspective. r Global essays provide an introductory, broad contextual sweep of coverage over the main themes of an individual volume’s topic areas, one per volume, focusing on the four divisions enunciated for the project.

My general exhortation to all contributors was that they try as much as it is within their power to emulate C. S. Lewis in style and substance, practicing the kind of empathetic dialogue with the subject matter that is characteristic of his own prose and poetry—as he saw it: “Plenty of fact, reasoning as brief and clear as English sunshine . . .” No easy task! But I am pleased to say that each essay does its job well—and, in my view, Lewis would not be displeased. I want to make the distinction as clear as possible between the four volumes published here and the typical “companion to” or “encyclopedia of” approach found in other treatments of Lewis’s life and work. We have not created a set of “nominalist” texts that focus on so many particulars that the “whole” is lost in the “parts.” Ours is not a “flip-through” set of texts in which “key words” drive the construction of essays and the experience of the reader—but one that features holistic essays that engross and educate earnest readers seeking an inclusive view of the essay’s topic area. While we enforced some general consistency of length and depth of coverage, there is no “false objectivity” or uniformity of prose style to be imposed. No, by contrast, these essays are meant to have “personality,” and serve as “stand-alone” essays that reflect an invested, personal scholarship and whose learned opinion is based on deep acquaintance with their subject matter. As independent Lewis scholars, it is important that all were granted the freedom to interpret responsibly and offer informed judgments about value, effectiveness, and significance of components of his life, times, and works, and to follow the scholarly instincts and unique insights wherever they may have led. It may be that here and there two essays will cross boundaries, and offer a different point of view on a shared topic. This is to be expected, and is not to be discouraged. Where there are controversial topics in Lewis scholarship, the task at hand was to “referee” the debate, explain the options, and gently lead us to the conclusions, if any, that best fit the facts. The bibliography for each essay is intended to be as current as possible as we reached our publication deadline, and should reflect the span of scholarship that has emerged since Lewis’s death in 1963. But, there is a major and

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comprehensive bibliographic essay on Lewis scholarship included in Volume 4, and we direct the reader’s attention there. As in any reference set of this scope, there will be unavoidable overlap in coverage of events, people, theme, citation of works, etc., throughout the volumes, and I humbly submit this is one of its strengths. Our contributors were attracted to this project because they saw that it offered C. S. Lewis scholars an opportunity to disseminate their work to a broader, popular audience and, consequently, offered them the potential to shape the ongoing public understanding of C. S. Lewis for a population of readers around the world for many decades. Those readers brought to C. S. Lewis through the increased visibility and popularity of The Chronicles of Narnia, will be especially enthused and rewarded by their sojourn in these pages. Our common approach in writing and editing this set is “academic” in the sense that it relies on studies/research/corroborated knowledge and reflection on assigned topics, but it is also the case that we always kept our general audience in mind, avoiding as much as possible any insider jargon or technical language that tends to exclude general readers. (Of course, any well-founded disciplinary terms necessary to explain and/or exemplify the achievement of Lewis are introduced and explained in context.) In the end, I am proud to say that our desire to present accurate and interesting information, wearing our scholarship firmly but lightly enough to invite entrance into fascinating, timely, and relevant subject matter about Lewis has been met. These essays were designed to reach, engage, and even enthrall educated and interested readers anxious to find out more about C. S. Lewis, including those who yet may not have any formal training in literary criticism or theology or apologetics per se. Indeed, these have always been Lewis’s most appreciative and attentive readers, and we are most pleased to have joined him in welcoming you here. Bruce L. Edwards

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The Ecumenical Apologist: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Christianity Victor Reppert

C. S. Lewis is easily the most influential Christian apologist of the twentieth century. This is remarkable in view of the fact that he only wrote three books that can be correctly said to have been devoted to Christian apologetics: The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, and Miracles: A Preliminary Study. There are, of course, a number of books and essays with considerable apologetic content, and much of even his fiction has apologetic overtones, yet if we think of what his apologetic books were, it is just those three. Moreover, those three books are short. Nevertheless, for many people C. S. Lewis succeeded in the apologist’s task, the task of showing that Christianity is worthy to be believed by modern intelligent people. I would count myself as one of those people. As an eighteenyear-old Christian with a powerful need for a faith that made sense, Lewis was immensely helpful in providing that. After going through seminary and doctoral work in philosophy, I find that Christianity is still believable for approximately the reasons that Lewis said that it was reasonable. That is not to say that I find everything equally acceptable or cogent, or that I think that Lewis has developed his arguments with sufficient precision to be defensible as they stand from a philosophical perspective. The word “approximately” is

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in that sentence for a reason. However, if I am right about what Lewis has accomplished, this is a considerable achievement. I think there are several important elements to Lewis’s success as an apologist. One contributing factor is the fact that Lewis’s authorship on a wide range of topics makes it possible for those who know him in virtue of his other writings to know him as an apologist. So, for example, in the Chronicles of Narnia we see Professor Kirke using an argument in favor of believing Lucy’s claim that she has been to Narnia that is similar to his famous “Mad, Bad or God” argument in Mere Christianity. In That Hideous Strength Lewis presents an account of what happens when people seriously take ethical subjectivism to heart, in The Abolition of Man we see these views defended by philosophical argument, and in Mere Christianity we find moral objectivity used as the grounds for theistic belief. Lewis brings the historical understanding of a literary scholar, the sharpened wit of a philosopher, the keen human understanding of a novelist, and the compassion of a writer of children’s books, to his apologetics. One striking feature of Lewis’s writings is their persistent refusal to patronize the audience. He was firmly convinced that he could explain complex philosophical and theological concepts to a popular audience without talking over their heads, using the jargon of specialists, or by talking down to them, acting as if they would be unwilling or unable to understand the relevant concepts. In the opening chapter of Beyond Personality, the last of the books that comprised Mere Christianity, we find Lewis saying this: Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book. They all say “the ordinary reader does not want Theology; give him plain practical religion.” I have rejected their advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means “the science of God,” and I would think that any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available. You are not children: why should you be treated like children?1

Even in dealing with children, Lewis steadfastly refuses to insult their intelligence. In another passage in Mere Christianity, he says, “Most children show plenty of ‘prudence’ about the things they are really interested in, and think them out sensibly.”2 I think this is one reason for Lewis’s success as a writer of children’s fiction; he refused to insult the intelligence even of the children for whom he wrote. Lewis also had a tremendous ability to know what the layperson did understand, and did not understand. This resulted in part from his visits to the RAF and talking with the airmen. He knew how lay audiences thought and what their obstacles were. Lewis knew what sorts of language, so familiar in church, would be unrecognizable to lay audiences, and he avoided it.

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Another reason for Lewis’s popularity as an apologist is that his apologetics are rational without being rationalistic. Lewis firmly believed that Christian faith is supported by reason, and was not shy about presenting arguments in favor of his Christian beliefs. At the same time, Lewis never made the assumption that human beings were purely and simply rational, and that the emotions or the will were insignificant. The Christianity Lewis defended was traditional, historic Christianity, deeply committed to a thoroughgoing supernaturalism. He did emphasize central Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, heaven, hell, and the Second Coming. The Christianity he espoused had a miraculous element for which he did not apologize. However, with respect to other issues, the bulk of Lewis’s apologetic work was neutral with respect to questions dividing Christians. I am not claiming that Lewis was completely successful in sticking to “Mere Christianity” in his apologetics and did not sometimes espouse doctrines that are at issue amongst Christians. (For example, Lewis’s treatment of the problem of evil presupposes the libertarian view of free will, and his conception of hell is at odds with Calvinist theology.) But what I mean is this: that his apologetics can be readily accepted and employed by people who accept the infallibility of the pope, even though he did not. Those who accept biblical inerrancy, even though he did not, can accept it. In fact, Calvinists can accept a good deal that Lewis says, even though Lewis was not a Calvinist. Lewis is arguably the most successful ecumenist of the twentieth century, bringing together Catholics and Protestants, inerrantists and antiinerrantists, and other groups of Christians otherwise divided. Lewis also brought the perspective of a Christian convert to his apologetics. He was an atheist, and a rather hostile one, in his teens, and came to believe in God only at the age of thirty-one. This means that he is able to look at Christianity from the non-Christian point of view. Logically, for example, there seems no good reason to suppose that the size of the universe can be used as an argument for atheism, and yet, in many minds, it does serve as such an argument (although I did see it advanced by an atheist in a debate recently), and Lewis found it necessary to respond to it. All of these things, I believe, have contributed to Lewis’s popular success as an apologist. However, Lewis has not always been equally well regarded among academics. In my own field of philosophy, his arguments are often dismissed as hardly worthy of discussion. In addition, I would have to admit that many of the things that make Lewis popular could exist in someone who, in the last analysis, offered poor reasons for being a Christian. In this essay, I will consider the question of whether the arguments found in Lewis’s Christian apologetics are good ones or bad ones. In particular I will be responding to the

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objections of John Beversluis, who maintained in his book C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion that Lewis’s apologetics are woefully inadequate, inconsistent, and laden with manifest fallacies.3 I will argue, on the contrary, that even if you disagree with Lewis’s conclusions, you should at least admit that his apologetics are not inconsistent and not fallacy-laden. THE FALSE ANSCOMBE LEGEND It is sometimes argued that not only are Lewis’s apologetics woefully inadequate, but that Lewis himself recognized this and abandoned apologetics at the height of his apologetic career, as a reaction to a devastating encounter with a real philosopher. This encounter was not with an atheist; it was with the Roman Catholic Elizabeth Anscombe. The legendary debate with Anscombe took place at the Oxford Socratic Club4 on February 2, 1948. In his book Miracles, published the year before, Lewis argued that naturalism—the view that only physical reality exists—is self-contradictory. Anscombe sharply criticized the argument, claiming that it was confused and based on the ambiguous use of key terms. According to the “Anscombe legend,” Lewis not only admitted that Anscombe got the better of the exchange, but recognized that his argument was wrong. Further, because of the exchange, Lewis gave up on Christian apologetics. According to Humphrey Carpenter, one of the purveyors of the Anscombe legend, “Though [Lewis] continued to believe in the importance of Reason in relation to his Christian faith, he had perhaps realized the truth of Charles Williams’s maxim, ‘No-one can possibly do more than decide what to believe.’”5 In short, Lewis went from a belief in the rationality of his faith to a fideistic position, according to which belief is based on faith and should not be defended rationally. Now it is true that, immediately following the debate, Lewis expressed disappointment to friends as to how the debate went. Further, Lewis did think that Anscombe’s objections were serious enough to require him to rewrite the relevant chapter of Miracles. Moreover, it is true that he wrote no more explicitly apologetic books after Miracles. Nevertheless, we have no reason to believe that he had any apologetic books in mind that went unwritten because of the exchange with Anscombe. What we do know is that he did continue to write essays on apologetical subjects. In “Is Theism Important” (1952), Lewis affirms the importance of theistic arguments, and says “Nearly everyone I know who has embraced Christianity in adult life has been influenced by what seemed to him to be at least probable arguments for Theism.”6 In “On Obstinacy of Belief” (1955), Lewis defends Christianity against the charge that while scientists apportion their beliefs to the evidence, religious people

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do not, and are therefore irrational.7 In “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger” (1958), Lewis defends his Christian apologetics against criticisms from a prominent theologian, hardly what you would expect him to do if he thought his career as an apologist had been misguided.8 The essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (1959) is a stinging assault on modern biblical scholarship of a skeptical variety, the sort of scholarship that is currently represented by members of the Jesus Seminar.9 If that essay is not a piece of Christian apologetics, then I simply do not know what apologetics is. I should note that Lewis not only revised his chapter on Miracles, but he also expanded the chapter. Now if you really thought that someone had proved you wrong, why in the world would you expand the very chapter that one’s opponent had refuted? What is more, this revision was not just something he thought of years later; an examination of the original issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe’s article appears we find a short response by Lewis in which he lays the foundation for the subsequent revision, which appeared in 1960.10 One devastating blow to the Anscombe legend has come from a surprising source. In his 1985 book C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, John Beversluis criticized C. S. Lewis’s apologetics as a failure and in so doing referred to the psychological impact of the Anscombe incident. He also analyzed the arguments, and found that “the arguments that Anscombe presented can be pressed further, and Lewis’s revised argument does nothing to meet them.”11 However, in a subsequent review of A. N. Wilson’s biography of C. S. Lewis, which implied Lewis wrote Narnia because he was running away from the thumping he got from Anscombe, Beversluis, much to his credit, abandoned the Anscombe Legend entirely. He wrote: First, the Anscombe debate was by no means Lewis’s first exposure to a professional philosopher: he lived among them all his adult life, read the Greats, and even taught philosophy. Second, it is simply untrue that the post-Anscombe Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics. In 1960, he published a second edition of Miracles in which he revised the third chapter and thereby replied to Anscombe. Third, most printed discussions of the debate, mine included, fail to mention that Anscombe herself complimented Lewis’s revised argument on the grounds that it is deeper and far more serious than the original version. Finally, the myth that Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics overlooks several post-Anscombe articles, among them “Is Theism Important?” (1952)—a discussion of Christianity and theism which touches on philosophical proofs for God’s existence—and “On Obstinacy of Belief”—in which Lewis defends the rationality of belief in God in the face of apparently contrary evidence (the issue in philosophical theology during the late 1950s and early 60s). It is rhetorically effective to announce that the post-Anscombe Lewis wrote no further books on Christian apologetics, but it is pure fiction. Even if it were true, what would this

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Argument from Abandoned Subjects prove? He wrote no further books on Paradise Lost or courtly love either.12

It is my contention that the Anscombe Legend is a pernicious falsehood about C. S. Lewis that richly deserves to be put to rest completely and permanently. You need to have a lot of “faith” to believe the stories Wilson and others tell about C. S. Lewis. You have to believe them even though your best reasoning tells you the weight of the evidence is against it. DID LEWIS ABANDON HIS APOLOGETIC POSITION IN A GRIEF OBSERVED? Another considerably more complex challenge to Lewis’s apologetical coherence has been the claim that in the course of grieving his wife’s death he retreated from some of the positions he had taken with respect to the relationship between God and goodness. Throughout his apologetic writings, Lewis had contended that when we say that God is good we mean something that is in some way continuous with the word “God” as applied to human beings. This doctrine of continuity is what Beversluis calls Platonism. The opposite view, which he calls Ockhamism, is the view that in calling God good we mean something completely different from what we mean when we call a person good. Therefore, for example, if God, before the foundation of the world, were to predestine a few people for heaven and everyone else to everlasting torture in hell, this would be good in virtue of the fact that God commanded it. The fact that this many would regard this action as cruel by any humanly conceivable moral standard would be simply dismissed as irrelevant. The fact that this is an affront to reason only shows that natural human reason is fallen and part of our desperately wicked human nature. It is not surprising that Ockhamism is popular among Calvinists, including Calvin himself.13 Now if this were correct, this would be a profound shift in Lewis’s thinking. After all, he had written an entire book of apologetics defending the claim that it is rational to believe that God is good in some recognizable sense even though there is a great deal of evil in the world. This is necessary only if there is some commensurability between our concept of goodness as applied to us and the concept applied to God. If Ockhamism is true, then it is a full and complete answer to the problem of evil to say the words of the New Testament Book of Romans 9:22: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God.” Lewis consistently condemned this Ockhamist position, at one point even claiming that such a doctrine would reduce Christianity to devil worship.

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Now in order to set the stage for our discussion of A Grief Observed, we should make a distinction between the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil. Lewis directed The Problem of Pain at the intellectual problem posed by human suffering. In the context of the discussion of an intellectual argument, it does not matter whether the sufferers are tsunami victims in Asia, or fellow American citizens who burned to death in the 9/11 attacks, or one’s nearest and dearest family members, or even one’s own suffering. From an intellectual perspective, all of these instances of suffering are of equal concern, but from an emotional perspective, the nearer the suffering is to us the more difficult it is to accept. A Grief Observed is a piece of pastoral theology aimed at the bereaved, focusing on the emotional problem of evil.14 However, it doesn’t follow from this that, in facing the emotional problem of evil, one might not have to come to terms with some intellectual issues. However, the main issue in the book is how to deal with the emotional impact of grief, and is not primarily an attempt to solve the problem of evil from an intellectual perspective. A Grief Observed is Lewis’s account of his own response to his wife’s death. Late in life, he married Joy Davidman, whom he knew to have cancer. Miraculously, after a prayer for healing, Joy’s cancer went into remission and the couple enjoyed a period of wedded bliss that included, among other things, a trip to Greece. However, eventually she relapsed and died. Lewis had been an atheist earlier in his life, and echoing that earlier perspective, he expressed deep anger toward God, calling him a “Cosmic Sadist,” an “Eternal Vivisector,” and a “very absent help in trouble.” In the latter portion of the book, Lewis withdraws the charges against God and accepts God’s goodness. It is Beversluis’s thesis that in the early stages of the book Lewis insists on the Platonistic understanding of God’s goodness, and concludes that God is a cosmic sadist. However, according to Beversluis, in the latter part of the book, he retreats to an Ockhamist position in order to escape those distressing conclusions, withdrawing the protests, but also the insistence that God be good in humanly recognizable terms. Now although A Grief Observed is not primarily addressed to the intellectual issue, Lewis does pose the problem of evil in forceful terms, in the context of his own grief. He writes: Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good”? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?15

However, if we are to say that Joy’s death posed an overwhelming intellectual problem to Lewis in his hour of grieving, it must be the case that some

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worldview distinct from a theism that included the commensurability of divine goodness to human goodness would have to be available to him. When we read Lewis’s account of his own conversion to Christianity, we find that even though Lewis formerly defended atheism based on the problem of evil, he never said that he became a theist or a Christian because he had found excellent answers to the problem of evil. Rather, he seems to have accepted theism largely because he found alternative worldviews inadequate. If his suffering really has given him cause to doubt his faith, then there must be some worldview other than theism, which has been rendered plausible by his sufferings. And what would that worldview be? It would certainly not be materialism. In language reminiscent of the argument from reason, he once again affirms that he finds that worldview thoroughly unbelievable. If he “is not,” then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared. But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? Bankruptcy declared to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms. I will never believe—more strictly I can’t believe—that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets.16

Notice his argument that he cannot believe that one cloud of atoms can make a mistake about other clouds of atoms. He offers no detailed defense of this kind of argument, the way he did in the face of Anscombe’s criticisms, but here he is answering himself, not Anscombe. He is indicating, in his own mind, why materialism is unbelievable. In fact, if you think about it, Lewis’s complaint against God makes sense only if you attribute a supernatural cause to Joy’s recovery. If what God did was simply let nature take its course and there was no miraculous recovery for Joy, then there cannot be a case against God. If materialism were true, then both Joy’s remission and her recovery would be simply a matter of nature taking its course. In Miracles, Lewis said that we should not expect miracles on an everyday basis. So one way for Lewis to resolve his problem with God would be to accept a “materialist” explanation of the events related to Joy’s cancer. (Of course, nonmaterialists can accept materialist accounts of various phenomena without inconsistency). What Lewis seems angry with God about is that God gave him “false hopes” and “led him up the garden path.” However, if God were not directly involved, there would be no problem. So Lewis considers instead the thesis of the Cosmic Sadist. He writes: No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we—or what we mistake for “we”—could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose of sleeping pills would

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do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, “God always geometrizes.” Supposing the truth were “God always vivisects”?17

However, Lewis has some things to say about the thesis of the Cosmic Sadist. He writes: I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally), the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can’t fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn’t be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C.—who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he’d been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn’t invent or create or govern anything. He would set up traps and try to bait them. But he’d never have thoughts of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend.18

Now Beversluis’s commentary is as follows: The shift occurs the moment Lewis begins to suspect that the hypothesis of the Cosmic Sadist is too anthropomorphic. According to such a view, God is like the man who tortures cats, and that is unbearable. Lewis recoils from this view and assures himself (and his readers), that when he called God an imbecile, it was “more of a yell than a thought.” After that, we hear no more about the Cosmic Sadist.19

In short, Beversluis supposes that Lewis is recoiling from the thesis of the Cosmic Sadist for emotional reasons. But is this all it is, an emotional recoil? It is at this point that my interpretation of A Grief Observed parts company with Beversluis’s interpretation. As it happens, the thesis of the Cosmic Sadist had already surfaced in Lewis’s apologetics, in his discussion of Dualism in Mere Christianity. Although there are many types of dualism that have been discussed in philosophy and religion, the Dualism Lewis is referring to is the kind of Dualism that says that the world was created jointly by eternally existing beings, one good and one evil. Against this, Lewis argues that the idea of an evil creator, or even an evil cocreator, is incoherent. He wrote: If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel because

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they have a sexual perversion, which makes cruelty cause a sensual pleasure in them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness, you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. . . . In other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.20

This argument, if correct, refutes the possibility that the world was created by an evil being, or even cocreated by an evil being. A close reading of the passage from A Grief Observed shows that Lewis is in that passage making exactly the same point. If Lewis is making or even referencing this argument, then it should be no surprise that we hear no more of the Cosmic Sadist. We should expect nothing else. This is why Lewis says that the name calling that he directed toward God was “more of a yell than a thought,” and why he accuses himself of not thinking clearly when he criticized God in the earlier passage. Lewis next turns to the possibility that, because of human depravity, his understanding of what is right and wrong is simply mistaken. If this is the case, then perhaps God really is a sadist, only sadistic behavior is right because it is God who does it. Lewis had attacked this position in very harsh terms in his previous writings, including The Problem of Pain. It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. With Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion (reached, I think, by Paley), that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that “they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides his will.”21

However, in A Grief Observed he presents what in my estimation is his most forceful anti-Ockhamist argument. If God’s white can be our black, if our standards of good and evil mean nothing, then we cannot count upon God to do anything whatsoever, including follow through on his own threats. Thus if Ockhamism is true, and God says “Turn or burn,” he could just as easily burn us after we turn (and reward all the ones who didn’t turn), just because, after all, his white could after all be our black.

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And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative), purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. It is true we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from His point of view “good,” telling lies may be “good” too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.22

Rene Descartes, in order to raise skeptical doubts about even our firmest certainties, imagined that we might be under the influence of an omnipotent evil demon whose goal is to deceive us as much as possible, and more recent philosophers have speculated about the possibility of our being brains in vats. The epistemic upshot of Ockhamism is essentially the same as the upshot of these hypotheses. According to Ockhamism, we are under the complete control of a being whose motives are either wicked or incomprehensible, and we will believe the truth only if this being arbitrarily chooses that we shall believe the truth. According to Lewis, Ockhamism is every bit as self-refuting as naturalism. If it is true, then we cannot believe the truth of Ockhamism, or of anything else, in a way that gives us any rational confidence that it is true. Beversluis argues that in A Grief Observed Lewis begins by insisting that God’s actions be good by standards that are commensurable with the standards we use to judge human behavior. Employing those standards, according to Beversluis, Lewis rightly concluded that God would have to be a Cosmic Sadist. To escape these unpleasant consequences, however, Beversluis claims that Lewis abandoned his long-held Platonism in favor of Ockhamism, accepting God’s goodness only in virtue of accepting a vacuous standard of good and evil. However, this overlooks the fact that in A Grief Observed Lewis presents arguments against both the thesis of the Cosmic Sadist and the thesis of Ockhamism. Of course, Beversluis is not the only person to have overlooked these arguments; favorable commentators like Richard Purtill have overlooked them as well. What do Lewis’s critics expect; that as a safeguard against grief he should rehearse his intellectual grounds for belief? But Lewis had no intellectual doubts about his faith, and no new data which might give him intellectual grounds for doubting his faith . . . There is in fact no evidence at all that Lewis was moved to any intellectual doubts at all by his personal loss, and thus there was no need to renew or rehearse his arguments.23

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The difficulty with Purtill’s claim here is that it assumes that it is introspectively obvious to a sufferer whether the doubts are intellectual or emotional in nature. This is far from the case. One of the pastoral needs of a bereaved person might be to understand that their grief experience in no way changes the evidential situation. That is why I would not call A Grief Observed “a book of Christian apologetics” per se; it has other primary functions to be sure, though it did perform a kind of apologetic role. To wit, contrary to what Purtill suggests here, Lewis did rehearse at least some of the reasons he had for being a Christian, and found them to be still standing. Given the fact that Lewis attacks the coherence of both the Cosmic Sadist theory and Ockhamism in A Grief Observed, what do we make of Beversluis’s charge that Lewis, in understanding the pain of his own bereavement and accepting the loss in the way that he did, he implicitly accepted an Ockhamist account of God’s goodness? After all, the fact that there are anti-Ockhamist arguments in A Grief Observed shows that Lewis never explicitly embraced Ockhamism in that work. However, perhaps his response to his own suffering was implicitly Ockhamistic, even though he did not realize it. What I find puzzling, however, is that the actual content of what Beversluis says happens in A Grief Observed is very similar to his verdict on The Problem of Pain. In his discussion of The Problem of Pain, Beversluis defines Ockhamism as [W]hen we talk about God’s goodness, we must be prepared to give up our ordinary moral standards. The term good when applied to God does mean something radically different from what it means when applied to human beings. To suppose that God must conform to some standard other than his own sovereign will is to deny his ultimacy. God is bound by nothing and answerable to no one.24

Later on, he writes that he is not going to claim that Lewis is an Ockhamist in The Problem of Pain. He says: At this point, I should perhaps allay possible suspicions that I am going to end up claiming that Lewis was really an Ockhamist. I am not. What I do insist on, however, is that by the time his argument has run its course he no longer claims that God’s goodness is recognizable in any ordinary sense. On the contrary, he suggests that we can call God good only if we are willing to assign a new meaning to the term.25

But I thought that what it is to be an Ockhamist was that you assigned a new meaning to the term “good.” Alternatively, looking at it from the opposite side, what it is to be a Platonist is to hold that our standards of good and evil must hold firm. Beversluis culminates his analysis by saying: How is Lewis’s view with its new meanings for good and love different from the Ockhamist view he deplores? In The Problem of Pain we are confronted with an apologist emphatically endorsing a view that he almost immediately lays aside for a

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position that differs only semantically from the position he claims to reject. By the time he has finished, our “black” has become God’s “white,” and moral standards have been reversed. What we call suffering, Lewis calls having our illusions shattered. What we call happiness, Lewis calls self-indulgence. What we call a moral outrage, Lewis calls a compliment. What we call kindness, Lewis calls indifference. What we call cruelty, Lewis calls love.26

When we get to A Grief Observed, Beversluis says The God who knocked down Lewis’s house of cards is not a Platonistically conceived deity who is good in our sense, but rather an Ockhamistically conceived being who is declared good no matter what he does. Lewis’s “rediscovered” faith is a faith in a God whose goodness is unlike our own that it can bee called good only by laying aside our moral standards together with our ordinary criteria for determining who has true faith and who does not. It is in this alarming sense that Heaven is said to “solve” our problems. Good now means “whatever God wills or permits.”27

So in his critique of The Problem of Pain Beversluis accuses Lewis of revising our moral standards, but this does not make him an Ockhamist; it only puts him in a position that differs only semantically from Ockhamism. In A Grief Observed he claims that after Lewis stops expressing anger toward God, he reverses our moral standards and in so doing, he becomes an Ockhamist. Quite honestly, the “semantic” difference between these two critiques escapes me. In order to argue for a profound transformation between The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed Beversluis has to forget the charges that he leveled against the former work. At one point Beversluis suggests that the evil Lewis faced in his grief experience was one that was of a kind that could not be accounted for by the explanations he had used in The Problem of Pain, since God was directly implicated, but that won’t do, since a good deal of his discussion of that book concerns his critique of Lewis’s “Shattering Thesis,” in which God brings us to knowledge of himself by shattering our illusions. At another point he remembers his discussion of the Shattering Thesis, but says The Shattering Thesis of A Grief Observed is not, of course a hitherto unheard-of idea in Lewis’s writings. It can be found in The Problem of Pain. What is new is not the thesis but Lewis’s recognition of its logical impact on the believer.28

However, this will not do either, since Lewis clearly does not recognize that he has become an Ockhamist. In fact, as Beversluis himself points out, Lewis maintained that his doubts had psychological and not logical causes. In short, I find no logical way to argue for a fundamental transformation of Lewis’s position between The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed. If Lewis is open to the charge of Ockhamism in A Grief Observed, then he was an Ockhamist in The Problem of Pain. If Lewis can be acquitted of the charge of being an

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Ockhamist in The Problem of Pain, then the same arguments can be used to show that he was not an Ockhamist in A Grief Observed. THE C. S. LEWIS DEFENSE C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain is Lewis’s first full-dress book of Christian apologetics. Since it does include the claim that God uses pain as a “megaphone” to rouse a deaf world, and since he also makes the claim that God uses pain to shatter our illusions, it might be valuable to see if Beversluis can successfully make the charge that in making these statements he lapses from a Platonistic to an Ockhamistic view of the relation between God and goodness. The problem of evil has been discussed extensively in the last forty years, and one critical distinction is the distinction between a defense and a theodicy. A defense attempts to rebut arguments from evil and does not necessarily attempt to provide a true explanation as to why suffering is permitted. A theodicy tries to account for suffering, giving the true explanations for why creatures suffer. A defense gives a possible explanation for the existence of suffering, showing the argument that God and suffering are incompatible is unsuccessful. Alvin Plantinga developed the Free Will Defense to deal with the argument from evil. Atheist philosophers like Antony Flew and J. L. Mackie had argued that the existence of evil was logically inconsistent with the existence of God, and that anyone who believed in God and also accepted the existence of suffering in the world was contradicting himself. However Plantinga argued that at least some evil, namely, the evil that results from human action, is compatible with the existence of God, in that the freedom to act against the good was itself a good, but in creating that good God would have to open the possibility that the choices thus made were the wrong choices. However, Plantinga had to consider the fact that at least some evil is not the result of evil actions on the part of human creatures. The Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, look to have not been caused by humans. However, Plantinga responded to this by saying that it was at least possible that all the suffering in the world was caused by the actions of rebellious free agents, either human or demonic. Thus, for example, it is at least possible that while humans cause evils like murder, perhaps Satan and his minions might have caused Katrina to occur in the way that it did, in order to inflict pain and suffering on the human race. Now, if you objected that, even if possible, this wasn’t very likely, Plantinga would argue that insofar as the atheist had begun by arguing that the theist was committed to a contradictory position in accepting the existence of both God and evil, the atheist would now be shifting ground, retreating to the probabilistic or evidential problem of evil rather than the logical problem of evil. The logic of each new variation in the argument

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from evil must be examined. For example, if the argument is a probabilistic argument from evil, how is probability theory being used? In Plantinga’s writings on the argument from evil, the emphasis is always on showing that the arguments from evil don’t work, and apart from an appeal to free will he really does little to explain exactly why evils are permitted. This approach I will call the defense strategy. It is a strategy grounded on our expected lack of understanding of the purposes behind God’s permitting suffering.29 Other thinkers have gone farther in attempting to explain why God permits suffering. This strategy is called a theodicy. The idea here is that even if we are able to show that there is something wrong with every version of the argument from evil, we would like to know, as best we can, why God permits suffering. Without some explanations as to why God permits suffering, some have argued that this puts the theist at a disadvantage relative to the atheist, who argues that as a matter of course his own view would allow us to anticipate the mixed bag of good and evils that we see in the world. It is often thought that Lewis’s The Problem of Pain is a theodicy in the classical sense. But is it? Lewis begins the book by noting the fact that people do not typically believe in God’s goodness because they infer the goodness of God from the goodness of creation; they instead believe in God’s goodness for other reasons. A sense of what Rudolf Otto called the Numinous, our sense of moral obligation and moral failure, the combination of those two elements to make a moralist religion amongst the Jews, and the claims of Christ are all things that, amongst real people, cause belief in a good God. So, if for independent reasons we think that God is good, how do we account for evil in a way that makes sense? That is how Lewis construes the problem of pain. Thomas Talbott, in his entry on The Problem of Pain for The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, argues that the crux of Lewis’s response to the problem of evil can be found in the second chapter, entitled “Divine Omnipotence,” and says that everything else in the book is ancillary. By this, he means, “even if his arguments in these subsequent chapters were substantially mistaken, his basic reply to the argument he set out to refute, the reply developed in chapter two, would stand.”30 If Talbott is correct, however, this would be a successful defense of theism against the argument from evil, but it would not be a theodicy. Lewis’s defense against the argument from evil has three steps to it. The first step is to point out that not even an omnipotent being can do the “intrinsically impossible,” that is, anything that involves a contradiction. An omnipotent being cannot make 2 + 2 = 5, or make it the case that the Apostle Paul freely repents of his sin. Lewis says, “You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense.” Alvin Plantinga, in his Free Will Defense, argued that there were possible worlds that God did not have the power to actualize, because these worlds’ actuality depends upon people freely choosing X who in fact chose Y.31

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The second step is to argue that we are not in a position to know for sure what is and is not logically possible. Is it logically possible to go backward in time? Some people think that it is, others do not. Thus, we may think that things are logically possible when they are not, or think that they are logically impossible, when they are logically possible. Third, the complexities involved in creating a world of free creatures that can freely choose to obey or disobey God is a good deal more complex than it looks. Thus, Lewis says: There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a “self,” can exist except in contrast with an “other,” a something which is not the self. It is against an environment and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that the awareness of Myself stands out.32

Hence, a society of free souls seems on its face to require a relatively independent and “inexorable” Nature, a Nature containing objects, which could be used for mutual benefit if parties cooperate, and which can be used to harm one another if parties oppose one another. Thus, in creating a world of free persons, Lewis suggests that God may have had no choice but to open up the possibility of pain and suffering. Lewis suggests the possibility that God might, through miracles, correct the effects of the abuse of free will, but he says that would effectively nullify the freedom of the will. He writes: We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of the abuse of free will by his creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void.33

Imagine, for example, a world in which all virtuous actions were rewarded in short order and all vicious actions punished in short order. In such a world there would be no effective free will, because no one in their right mind would be so much as tempted to do the wrong thing. Everyone would do the right thing out of self-interest. Nevertheless, Lewis does not claim that he knows, or that anyone knows what God could have done and what God could not have done. As I said before, this account of the intrinsic necessities of a world is meant merely as a specimen of what they might be. What they really are, only Omniscience has the data and the wisdom to see: but they are not likely to be less complicated than I have suggested.34

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Although some people think that God could clearly have made the world better by leaving cancer out of it, Talbott argues, following up on Lewis’s ideas, that we are far from being in a position to know this. He writes: Perhaps Beversluis thinks that God could have improved things immeasurably by eliminating cancer from the world. But how could anyone (who is not omniscient), possibly know that or even have reason to think it true? Try this thought experiment. Try to imagine what our world (with exactly the same persons in it), might have been in the absence of cancer. Our experiment won’t be at all technically accurate, of course, and may even be incoherent, but it may also be pedagogically useful. To begin with, then we must delete from the world (in our imagination), all the pain and suffering caused by this terrible disease as well as all the psychological torment experienced by both cancer victims and those who love such victims; then we must delete all the good—such as the courageous endurance of pain—for which the cancer is a necessary condition; then we must delete all the free choices—and all the consequences of such free choices—that either would not have been made at all or would have been made differently if our world had been devoid of cancer. As one can see, things quickly get complicated. If God exists and there is an afterlife, some of the choices may be choices that result in eternal joy and happiness for some persons. But that is just the beginning of our experiment . . . Trying to figure out what a world of free persons would be like in the absence of cancer is not like calculating where the planets would be if they had been in certain specified positions last year . . . Once one begins to think through such complexities as these—which we have barely touched upon—the anti-theistic argument from evil begins to look less and less plausible.35

Therefore, Talbott argues, Lewis’s defense of theism works not by showing that some better world would be impossible, but by showing that since we do not what worlds are and are not possible, and if they would really better worlds or whether they would not be better worlds, the argument from evil falls before the “C. S. Lewis Defense.” Now I would not be quite as confident as Talbott, in the sense that I think that the argument presupposes something that Lewis never argues for but would be denied by many defenders of the argument from evil. That is the claim that God cannot give freedom to creatures without at the same time opening the possibility that they might do wrong. If you define freedom as having the power to do what you want to do, God could create everyone in such a way that they always wanted to do the right thing, and then gave them the ability to carry out that good will at all times. If God could do that, then it seems as if He should have done that, and the argument from evil would still be unanswered. I myself do not think that this position of “compatibilism,” the idea that the same action can be determined by God and free in the sense required for moral responsibility or free in the sense that God would find desirable, is one that can be defended. However, all I am pointing out here

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is that a complete “C. S. Lewis Defense” would require some argumentation on behalf of this crucial assumption. If the C. S. Lewis Defense is successful, then Lewis does not have to revise our concept of goodness at all to accept the pain and suffering in the world, including his own pain and suffering as a grieving widower. All he needs to do is to maintain that he does not know that there is a world in which he does not suffer as he does that God had the power to actualize, that would be better all around that the actual world in which he does suffer because of the loss of his wife. If he can affirm that, even if he never, this side of heaven, comes to any answer as to why his wife was taken from him at that time, he cannot be said to have drifted from Platonism to Ockhamism. LEWIS ON DIVINE GOODNESS Lewis, of course, is not content to develop the C. S. Lewis defense, and I am not even sure he would concur with Talbott that the defense is a sufficient refutation of all arguments from evil. His next task is to develop and clarify the concept of divine goodness. On the one hand, he maintains that what we mean by good in referring to God must be commensurable with what we mean by good in creatures, and that we must not allow ourselves to say that our black is God’s white. So, for example, we are not free to admit that some act of God is senselessly cruel, and then say that our black is God’s white. On the other hand, our understanding of what is right or wrong may stand in need of correction. He says: If God is wiser than we His judgment must differ from us on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.36

Does this mean, as Beversluis charges, that at the end of the day our black really does become God’s white? According to Talbott: When considering a disagreement about the moral consequences of an act, one must distinguish carefully between two very different cases: one in which all of the relevant facts (such as the exact circumstances in which the act was performed), are known, and those in which some of the relevant facts are not known. A primitive who concludes that men in white coats bearing long needles are cruel to children need not be operating from a moral framework that differs substantially from our own; nor would it be surprising to find that a loving father in a primitive culture wants to “protect” his child from the shot of penicillin that a missionary doctor, filled with the love of God, wants to administer. The loving father simply lacks some important information.37

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Lewis does maintain that the problem of evil will be insoluble so long as certain popular meanings are attached to the terms “good” and “love.” Beversluis maintains that Lewis is redefining these terms, abandoning their ordinary usage in order to defend God against the problem of evil. However, what Lewis is in fact doing is arguing that these popular meanings are in fact corruptions of the proper uses of the terms. In fact, Lewis wrote a book entitled Studies in Words in which he explained how the content of some words could be damaged or weakened in popular usage, so that their meaning has been lost.38 And Plato’s Socrates was never satisfied with “popular meanings” of words, which is why he questioned people as to whether they mean what they really meant by the words they used, concluding that they not only did not know what they were talking about, but they compounded that ignorance with the further ignorance of thinking that they did.39 About the terms “good” and “love” Lewis writes: By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively his lovingness, and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a god who said of anything we happened to like doing, “What does it matter so long as they are contented.”40

Lewis then argues that God wants to give people the only happiness that he can provide, the happiness of a life in fellowship with himself, the kind of happiness that can last for an eternity. As such, God cannot be satisfied with a creaturely “satisfaction” that does not deepen a person’s connection to God. He also analyses love and discovers that the higher the love, the more the lover expects from the beloved. The higher the level of love, the “tougher” that love is on the one who is loved. However, this does not involve any alteration of what the terms “good” and “love” mean upon reflection; it is only the recognition of defective popular meanings that have been attached to these words. Lewis then explores the human condition, arguing that the way in which humans behave is in profound need of correction, attempting to recover what he calls “the old sense of sin.” Here he attempts to undermine a wide range of arguments people make for the claim that they are not such bad people after all. Why do bad things happen to good people? If Lewis had heard that question, he would argue against the supposition that such people are good. While many people are not outwardly bad compared to other people, He writes: I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the

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saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e. a perfection), with an illusion (i.e. an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo around his silly head. No, depend upon it: when the saints say that they—even they, are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.41

Lewis then goes on to present an admittedly speculative theory about how human beings might have gone from a state of obedience to God to one of disobedience, the doctrine of the fall of man. It is after these preliminaries that Lewis begins to discuss human suffering and why it occurs. He first identifies the proper good of a human creature as the submission of that person’s will to God, the surrender of human selfwill to God’s will. He points out that even non-Christian and nontheistic religions require this kind of submission, so this is not a viewpoint peculiar to Christianity. Lewis does not argue that pain is the only method God uses to bring about submission to God, but it is a significant one. God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, and shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.42

Lewis delineates three contexts in which pain may serve as the redemptive purpose of driving us toward submission to God. The first is simply an expression of the common belief that bad people ought to suffer. Although Lewis notes that some people object to the idea of retributive punishment, retribution is the only thing that makes sure that punishment is just. According to Lewis, pain “plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.”43 However, if the pain of bad people shatters the illusion that all is well, pain in the lives of other people shatters the illusion that what we have is enough. Even good Christians find it difficult to turn toward God when they feel as if they have all they need. He writes: Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when he thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children is not enough to make them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore he troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover.44

In one letter Lewis asked for prayer from a Christian friend because he was going through “A Plain Called Ease.”45 If the kind of good that will make for permanent happiness requires a relationship to God, then ordinary prosperity may take that away from us.

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The third role of suffering is based on the idea that God expects us to submit our wills to him, and that cannot possibly be willed by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant. Mere obeying is intrinsically good, but given human self-will, obedience cuts against the self-centered will. We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may well be agreeable, and that the better a man is the more he will like it; but we agree with Kant so far as to say that there is one right act—that of self-surrender—which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant. And we must add that this one right act includes all other righteousness, and that the supreme canceling of Adam’s fall, the movement “full speed astern” by which we retrace our long journey from Paradise, the untying of the old, hard knot, must be when the creature with no desire to aid it, stripped naked to the bare willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does that for which only one motive is possible.46

In the Book of Job Satan asks “Does Job serve God for naught?” implying that Job’s righteousness can be explained by the benefit Job receives from his obedience, and he asks the question of whether Job would remain faithful and righteous if his life were wracked with suffering. Thus a faithful person, who is prospering, in one sense, is not asked to make the most profound act of self-surrender. This can only occur if the apparent link between righteousness and reward is broken. In arguing as he does Lewis explicitly says that he is attempting to make the doctrine of being made perfect by suffering “not incredible.” He does not say that he can make it palatable; in fact, he says that it is not palatable. Now does this understanding of suffering represent a retreat from Platonism? Is it an abandonment of the idea that the standards we use in evaluating the actions of God are commensurable to the standard we use in evaluating human actions? I think pretty clearly that this is not true. There is an intended good which is a good for the creature, which is supposed to make the suffering worthwhile. Nor is it overly difficult to see how Lewis’s own suffering in grief could be thought of as serving a redemptive purpose. Since the causes of our suffering are complex, we need not presume, as Beversluis does, that the degree to which a person suffers is indicative of state of one’s relationship with God. He writes: Yet, if we accept this argument, we must conclude that those who suffer only appear to be close to God but in fact are not—otherwise, why do they suffer? We must also conclude that those who do not suffer only appear to have drifted from God but in fact have not. Furthermore, the more you suffer, the further from God you are; the less you suffer, the further from God you are. Furthermore, the more you suffer, the more God loves you, and the less you suffer, the less he loves you, since it is those we

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love that we punish and those to whom we are indifferent that we allow to be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.47

However, remember, Lewis has given three different circumstances where God might have a redemptive use for pain, and these three circumstances can occur on different spiritual levels. Remember also that Lewis has made the case that the most spiritually advanced persons are persons who recognize that they are “vile,” that is, they recognize more fully than the rest of us just how far they have to go to be fully surrendered to God. Lewis’s claim concerning the reasons for suffering is not a simplistic “shattering thesis,” for people who are far from God, it is a complex thesis concerning how suffering works redemptively at all levels of spiritual development. The last of these uses of suffering, suffering as an opportunity to continue to serve God without the appearance of reward, involves no shattering whatsoever. As Petrik says: The bottom line for Lewis, however, is that the business of mending souls is so complex that we can not hope to fully understand the manner in which suffering is distributed among human beings. Noting the vast discrepancy between the degree to which individuals may suffer, Lewis confesses that he is ignorant of the causes of this distribution. And of course he is right. Any speculation as to the role of suffering or its absence is playing in an individual’s spiritual development will always remain fairly blind speculation . . .

In addition to this, Lewis also mentions here a redemptive use of suffering for the benefit of others. He writes: What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads.48

So suffering does not merely benefit the character of the sufferer, it can also benefit the character of those who observe the suffering. As Talbott writes, “Nothing, it seems, arouses compassion and melts the heart of the arrogant and the powerful in a way comparable to the suffering of children.”49 Another objection found in Beversluis is that if we were to inflict suffering on those we love in the way that Lewis is suggesting that God does, we would be acting wrongly. He writes: On thing is certain in any case: if I were to become as “exacting” with (my children), in Lewis’s awful sense, I am confident that they would not rejoice in their newly acquired discovery that I really loved them. Nor do I believe that such a failure would be a sign of some juvenile deficiency in them.50

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However, someone with greater wisdom and knowledge might surely have the right to use means that someone with less wisdom and knowledge would not have the right to use. As Lewis himself says: To turn this (the redemptive role of suffering), into a general charter for afflicting humanity “because affliction is good for them” (as Marlowe’s Tamberlaine boasted himself as the scourge of God”), is not indeed to break the divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must be prepared for his wages.51

So I do not think that Lewis has to violate his “professed Platonism” in order to accept his own account of suffering. Nor was Lewis wrong to see his own suffering during his grief experience as God’s work in getting him to cease his reliance on earthly comforts, even the comfort of a Christian marriage. Another difficulty, however, pressed by Erik Weilenberg, is that Lewis really does not deal with the suffering of children in his treatment of the problem of pain.52 It is a bit odd, because he is willing to consider the suffering of another class of “special victims,” that is, animals. Children are more like us than animals, and so he cannot make the comment about children’s suffering that he makes about animal suffering, namely, that he really doesn’t know much about the place of animals in God’s plan and that whatever he says about them is going to be speculative. By way of response to this difficulty, I would make three points. One is that no treatment of the problem of evil can be expected to be comprehensive. As Daniel Howard-Snyder points out, if we could explain all of our sufferings we would be contradicting some clear biblical passages, such as what we find in the Book of Job. He goes on to say: We do others a grievous disservice to hold out to them in private or in the pulpit any expectation to understand why God would permit so much evil or any particular instance, expectations which we have no reason to believe will be fulfilled, expectations which when left unfulfilled can become near irresistible grounds for rejecting the faith. We are in the dark here. We can’t see how any reason we know of, or the whole lot of them combined, would justify God in permitting so much horrible evil or any particular horror. We need to own up to that fact.53

So we should see Lewis as attempting to give us a substantial understanding of much of the evil we see and experience, but I think he was not foolish enough to think that he had explained it all. But secondly, as is evident from the quote from Talbott, in the case of the suffering of children, here the case is hardest to make that it can benefit the sufferers morally, but it does have the strongest effect of all suffering on those whom Lewis calls “the spectators,” it arouses their compassion in the way that nothing else in the world does. I would have liked Lewis to include more discussion of the suffering of children

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in The Problem of Pain, and I do consider it a weakness of the book that this was not included. However, that in itself is not, in my judgment, sufficient to make his book an abject failure or a tissue of fallacies. STRAW MEN AND ETHICAL SUBJECTIVISM The other criticisms that Beversluis makes against Lewis are that he often uses arguments that commit the straw man fallacy. In The Abolition of Man and in essays like “The Poison of Subjectivism” and “De Futilitate,” Lewis is critical of the doctrine of ethical subjectivism, and in Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that objective moral values constitute the basis for an argument for theism. In “De Futilitate,” Lewis writes: “A man cannot continue to make sacrifices for the good of posterity if he really believes that his concern for the good of posterity is an irrational subjective taste of his own on the same level with his fondness for pancakes and his dislike for spam.” Beversluis is particularly incensed at this remark, This unqualified rejection (of ethical subjectivism) is surprising in view of the fact that he examines only two versions of the position he opposes, and only the weakest and most carelessly formulated ones at that: the view that morality is either a “herd instinct” or a mere subjective preference on the same level as a fondness for pancakes and a dislike for spam. This is irresponsible writing. To give vent to so ill-considered an opinion is to betray either that one knows next to nothing about ethical theory or that one simply chooses to ignore inconvenient points of view.54

In addition, later he writes: Ethical subjectivists do not, of course, claim that aesthetic and moral judgments are mere expressions of feelings or subjective preference. Nor do they regard such judgments as unimportant.55

Are these claims accurate? In Language, Truth and Logic, A. J. Ayer had written, What we do not and cannot argue about is the validity of these moral principles. We merely praise and condemn them in the light of our feelings . . . For we have seen that ethical judgments are mere expressions of feelings, there can be no way of determining the validity of any ethical system, and, indeed, no sense in asking whether any such system is true.56

Bertrand Russell, a well-known moral subjectivist, compared moral judgments to whether one prefers oysters or does not. He wrote: The theory which I have been advocating is a form of the doctrine which is called the “subjectivity” of values. This doctrine consists in maintaining that that, if two men differ about values, there is not a disagreement as to any kind of truth, but a

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difference of taste. If one man says “oysters are good” and another says “I think they are bad,” we recognize that there is nothing to argue about. The theory in question holds that all differences as to values are of this sort, although we do not naturally think them so when we are dealing with matters that seem to us more exalted than oysters.57

So clearly, Lewis was not criticizing an unoccupied position. Nor was it wrong of Lewis to criticize, as he did in The Abolition of Man, an English textbook that made a number of statements implying an implicitly subjectivist view of ethics and aesthetics. Often ideas really begin to show their consequences when they are taught at lower levels in education. For example, I believe that the way in which children are taught to distinguish “fact” from “opinion” in grade school has the tendency to render students insensitive to the possibility of serious reasoning about profoundly debatable issues. If something is either a “fact”(we know how to figure it out), or “opinion” (a merely subjective matter), then why reason about something so controversial and complex as, say, the existence of God? However, does moral subjectivism have to be so simplistic? Even if Beversluis agrees that ethical subjectivism has sometimes been presented in just the way Lewis describes it, perhaps it does not have to have the implications Lewis says it does. Beversluis gives a number of characteristics that ethical judgments can have even though they are subjective: they guide conduct, influence choice, and express attitudes, those who make them are prepared to universalize them, and give reasons in support of them. Now I think Beversluis’s comments are somewhat anachronistic, in the sense that Lewis’s discussions of moral subjectivism were written in the 1940s, but Beversluis seems to be describing a prescriptivism, which was developed in the 1950s by R. M. Hare. More seriously, however, Lewis does consider the position of many writers from his own time, which started from the claim that “traditional” morality was all subjective but then attempted to support some virtue or other on a more “realistic” basis, perhaps attempting to base ethics on “instinct” or the survival of the species. He argues that this is impossible, and that once we reject “traditional morality” by making it subjective and asking, “Why should we follow these rules?” we cannot introduce any other value without having the same question asked of the newly proffered value. The fact that someone is prepared to universalize some value judgment is no answer to somebody who simply denies the legitimacy of the value in question. So in addition to simple subjectivism, which claims that ethical judgments are like tastes in food, Lewis is prepared to consider a more complex subjectivism, which says that while ethical judgments are subjective, it has some feature X, which keeps it above the level of mere

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preferences. Lewis offers a general line of argument against this, which goes like this. (Assumption for reduction): 1. Ethical judgments are subjective, but have a characteristic, X, which makes them different from mere preferences (willingness to universalize them, support for the survival of the species, and basis in instinct, etc.). 2. Either X is something that is valuable objectively, or it is only subjectively significant. 3. If X is valuable objectively, then ethical judgments are actually objective, and subjectivism is false. 4. If X is valuable only subjectively, then there is no real difference between ethical judgments and mere preferences. 5. Therefore, ethical judgments are objective, or they are not on a different level from mere preferences.

If one is going to defend moral subjectivism by denying that it puts ethical judgments on a level with mere preferences, then one must confront this line of argument from Lewis. Beversluis never comes to terms with it. A good deal more could be said about the cogency and coherence of Lewis’s apologetic arguments. It is my contention that Lewis’s arguments, even if unsound, cannot be easily refuted. If they are sound, however, they require further development. I expect debate about the arguments in Lewis’s apologetics to continue for years to come. NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1952), 135. 2. Ibid., 74. 3. John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985). 4. An undergraduate debating society whose purpose was to discuss issues surrounding Christian faith. Lewis was the first president of the club, a position he held at the time of the debate. 5. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 217. 6. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 173. 7. C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), 13–30. 8. Lewis, God in the Dock, 177–183.

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9. C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 152– 166. 10. Lewis, God in the Dock, 146. 11. Beversluis, Search for Rational Religion, 73. 12. John Beversluis, “Surprised by Freud: A Critical Appraisal of A. N. Wilson’s Biography of C. S. Lewis.” Christianity and Literature 41(2) (1992): 191–192. 13. Beversluis, Search for Rational Religion, 102–103; Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 21–28. 14. Art Lindsley, C. S. Lewis’s Case for Christ (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005), 50–65. 15. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 33. 16. Ibid., 32–33. 17. Ibid., 33. 18. Ibid., 35–36. 19. Beversluis, Search for Rational Religion, 150. 20. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 49. 21. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 100. 22. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 37–38. 23. Richard Purtill, “Did C. S. Lewis Lose His Faith,” in A Christian for All Christians, ed. Andrew Walker and James Patrick (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), 35. 24. Beversluis, Search for Rational Religion, 102. 25. Ibid., 104. 26. Ibid., 118–119. 27. Ibid., 151. 28. Ibid., 160. 29. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford University Press, 1974), 164–196. 30. Thomas Talbott, “The Problem of Pain” in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey Schultz and John West (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 349–350. 31. Plantinga, op cit. 32. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 29. 33. Ibid., 33 34. Ibid., 34 35. Talbott, “C. S. Lewis and the Problem of Evil,” in Christian Scholar’s Review (September 1987), 41–42. 36. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 37. 37. Talbott, “C. S. Lewis and the Problem of Evil,” 44. 38. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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39. James Petrik, “In Defense of C. S. Lewis’s Analysis of God’s Goodness,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 36(1) (1994): 46–47. 40. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 40. 41. Ibid., 67. 42. Ibid., 93. 43. Ibid., 95. 44. Ibid., 97. 45. Letter to Sister Penelope, June 5, 1951 in Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Hooper, 410. Quoted in Purtill, “Did C. S. Lewis Lose his Faith.” 46. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 101. 47. Beversluis, Search for Rational Religion, 117. 48. Petrik, “In Defense,” 54. 49. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 110. 50. Beversluis, Search for Rational Religion, 114. 51. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 112. 52. Erik Wielenberg, “The Christian, the Skeptic, and the Atheist: C. S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell on God,” forthcoming. 53. Daniel Howard-Snyder, “God Evil and Suffering,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael Murray (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 101. 54. Beversluis, Search for Rational Religion, 40. 55. Ibid., 45 56. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover Edition, 1952), 111–112. 57. Bertrand Russell, Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 237–238.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Beversluis, John. C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985. Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. New York: Seabury, 1963. ———. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Petrik, James. “In Defense of C. S. Lewis’s Analysis of God’s Goodness.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 36(1) (1994). Talbott, Thomas, “C. S. Lewis and the Problem of Evil.” Christian Scholar’s Review 17 (September 1987): 36–51.

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C. S. Lewis as Allegorist: The Pilgrim’s Regress Mona Dunckel

C. S. Lewis’s initial imaginative work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, published in 1933, is an allegory. Although it is a veiled account of his real spiritual journey to salvation, one is moved to ask, “Why would C. S. Lewis write his first work of fiction in the form of an allegory?” While allegory had enjoyed a long and distinguished history from the Greeks through the Renaissance as a writing form, it had gradually fallen into decline and disuse in the early twentieth century. Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien was notoriously opposed to allegories and clearly states his aversion in his introduction to The Lord of the Rings, claiming an antipathy that began with his ability to first discern the genre. His distaste stemmed from a belief that allegory afforded its author too much “domination” over the imagination of the reader. Many literary critics of the time used the term pejoratively, decrying the fact that a piece of work had “degenerated into allegory.” Lewis, however, felt differently about the genre. He was already well into his study of the medieval uses of allegory, which he would explicate in his still highly praised work of literary criticism, The Allegory of Love, published in 1936. The good reception of Lewis’s study aided his efforts to revitalize and reestablish the position of allegory at a time when few were interested in the genre. Though the position was unlike that of many critics of his time, Lewis shared with Dorothy Sayers a belief that allegory was a natural part of man’s

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existence and experience. Lewis also felt that allegory spoke to some basic inborn human need. Sayers had identified allegory as a genre that generally appeared as an accompaniment to great change in the thinking of an age or a culture, growing out of those changes. Lewis appears to have shared this view as well. The years following World War I could have been viewed by Lewis as an allegory-generating era. The time is marked by world–shifting changes in thought and the philosophy that forever shifted European academia as well as the worldview and behavior of the ordinary man. Perhaps Lewis saw allegory as the “time-appropriate” vehicle for his ideas? More probable, however, is that allegory seemed an appropriate medium for writing about the fundamental change that had revolutionized the foundations of his personal thinking—his conversion. It may have further seemed like the proper vehicle for his story because allegory, at times, serves as the best manner for expressing something that is so new that one has not yet acquired the words for describing it. It is possible that Lewis had not yet found the language that would allow him to fully communicate his conversion experience. Additionally, it is not unusual in Lewis’s writing to detect the influences of other writing projects he was working on at the time. While his studies and lectures, which became The Allegory of Love, do not seem to be a direct influence on the content of The Pilgrim’s Regress, it certainly may have influenced Lewis’s decision to choose the form of allegory for his work of fiction. There is perhaps one further influence on Lewis’s choice of allegory as the pattern for the story he wished to tell, and that is of course his familiarity with and appreciation for John Bunyan’s works, Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War. Since The Pilgrim’s Regress was to tell Lewis’s journey from unbelief to Christianity it may have seemed appropriate to replicate the form in which Bunyan earlier had written of Christian’s quest. Still another possibility is that Lewis’s choice of allegory as the vehicle for his story may have been aided by the fact that Lewis had already written one allegorical work, his book-length poem Dymer. Perhaps, like Sayers’s belief that allegory serves to make some experiences clearer and more easily understood, Lewis thought allegory provided the clearest method for him to write and understand his quasiautobiographical account. The Pilgrim’s Regress remains as Lewis’s only foray into the writing of “pure” allegory, but his study and reading of the genre continued throughout his life. LEWIS ON ALLEGORY A brief consideration of some of Lewis’s major ideas about allegory may be beneficial before going any further. Knowing how Lewis thought about

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the genre can only assist in the reading of The Pilgrim’s Regress. Allegory, as Lewis explains in The Allegory of Love, starts when an author selects some invisible, nonmaterial reality—like truth—and creates something—a fictional character or object—to represent that nonmaterial fact in his tale. The author does this deliberately; he knows what he is doing. He expects the reader to see what is being done and to follow along in the story. From this element of Lewis’s description one may define allegory as a story intentionally created by its author with two distinct levels of meaning, one found in the story itself and the other existing in the author’s underlying representations. Lewis makes several other suppositions about allegory that are also important in gaining a general understanding of the genre. First, he believed that when creating allegory, particularly if the writing was full of powerful images and word pictures, authors actually created more meanings than they were aware of. The pictures may be able to create in the mind of readers far more layers of meaning or different meanings than those the author had seen. Second, Lewis believed that the pictures that are created by allegorists use certain symbols or representations that authors expect their readers to know. If a person who doesn’t know anything about the Bible reads Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, there will be many symbols that the reader simply won’t be able to understand. An additionally important matter about allegory is that its meaning does not change over time. The particular meaning the author intended at the time of composition is the meaning that remains constant over time. Lewis offers some thoughts on the reading of allegory in an essay on Edmund Spenser published more than twenty years after the publication of his Pilgrim’s Regress. His key piece of advice for reading allegory amounts to a sort of “don’t work too hard at understanding it” statement. He suggests that allegorical reading, like many other activities, is least successful when we are most consciously working at it. He would instead urge readers first to enjoy the story that they are reading, which will allow a gradual awareness of the deeper meaning.1 More advice on reading allegory comes in the posthumously published work, Spenser’s Images of Life. This book, an unfinished work, was completed by Alastair Fowler using Lewis’s notes. This additional advice is essentially “don’t translate characters into their meanings when reading the story”—in other words, one must keep the two levels of the story separate and one shouldn’t mix them as he or she reads. Doing so would weaken the story on both levels. Allegory can be difficult to read, Lewis notes, because the symbols chosen by the author, while known in his time, may no longer be part of common knowledge for the reader. When this happens the author’s intended meaning may be irretrievably lost. Another obstacle to successfully reading allegory

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is our own preconceptions. What we expect to find and what we think we know may blind us to the meaning that the author intended. Lewis suggests that we can never be sure that we have extracted all of the intended meaning from the allegory through our reading, claiming that since the author is not fully conscious of everything included in an allegory, we as readers do not have an accurate measure of meaning to extract against which to compare our gleanings.2 While these obstacles for reading allegory exist, they are not unconquerable; the best approach with which to combat the difficulties is practice in reading the genre, for the more time readers spend in the reading of allegory the more skillful they will become at recognizing its nuances and in unpacking the meanings within the stories. Despite the reader’s best efforts at reading allegory, Lewis realizes the author may not provide a sufficiently coherent story for the reader to follow. In an essay on John Bunyan published in 1962, Lewis explains that allegories are successful only if the author is careful to stick to his purpose and his story. Lewis contends that in the Pilgrim’s Progress, the story breaks down at times and the reader loses sight of the author’s images because Bunyan forgets his story and preaches, instead of using the story to make his point. CONVENTIONS IN ALLEGORY A very readable source on the conventions of allegory is Dorothy L. Sayers’s essay, “On Writing and Reading Allegory.” Within her short history of the form, she identifies four key elements, or conventions, generally found in allegories. First is the use of personification, in which many if not all of the characters will be what Sayers called “personified abstractions,”3 whereby they represent some idea, vice, or virtue. One can look at any chapter of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and find characters that embody virtues or vices. Christian, for example, travels with Faithful, meets Piety, Hopeful, as well as the giant Despair. All of these characters serve as examples of abstract ideas that have been personified. A second common element in allegory is that the story often employs the motif of a journey. This may be a one-way or round-trip affair, but the hero is commonly a traveler or a pilgrim. This convention allows the author to introduce people or elements into the story with more ease and variety than may be achieved if the hero stays at home. The journey may also be used to introduce an overarching purpose for what takes place, particularly when the protagonist is cast as some sort of seeker or pilgrim. A third convention of allegories is to have characters participate in informal debate, thereby allowing the author to present opinions on a wide range of topics. Lewis made extensive and excellent use of this convention in The

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Pilgrim’s Regress, but if poorly used, this device can create an undesirable tone in the story leading to its breakdown. A final convention in many allegories is the use of a dream framework, in which a story is presented as being a dream of a narrator. In The Pilgrim’s Regress, the author is clearly the storyteller, but it is equally clear from the first words of the novel that the story is a dream of the speaker. From the first line of Lewis’s tale, there can be no doubt that the narrator is recounting his vision, and numerous other chapters remind the reader of the narrator’s visionary state. For example, three of the six chapters in Book I repeat the information that the narrator is presenting what he saw as he slept, and the reminders continue to the last page of the allegory. On the final page the reader is told that the story has ended because the sleeper had awakened. A SHORT SYNOPSIS OF THE PILGRIM’S REGRESS “I dreamed of a boy who was born in the land of Puritania and his name was John.”4 So begins Lewis’s story. Early in his life John learns that there are rules; he also learns that these rules were made by the steward who is the representative of the landlord, the owner of all of Puritania. John’s parents took him to meet the steward who was jovial and kind, until he put on a mask and frightened John with a long lecture about the rules and the Landlord. He gave John a card on which were printed all of the rules that he must follow. John left the Steward’s house confused, with two contradictory ideas about this absent Landlord: (1) he is a very kind and good person, and (2) he shuts those who do wrong in a black hole overflowing with scorpions and snakes. Several days later, John wandered farther down the road in front of his home than he had ever been before. There he found a walled garden, and in the wall, a window. Through the window John saw a beautiful wood full of flowers. As he looked at the wood, it seemed to him as if the woodland mist had parted and he had seen a beautiful island and heard haunting music, and he felt a longing so intense that it made him forget all that had been part of his life. When the vision disappeared and the music stopped, John wept. He returned home, sure that he knew what he wanted. When John was older he returned often to the woodland hoping for another glimpse of the island. On one visit he met a naked brown girl who convinced John that she was what he had really wanted. John tried to fulfill his desire for the island through a relationship with the girl, but his pleasure was only temporary and he came to realize that she was not what he wanted. While John tried to follow the rules of the Landlord, he was not particularly successful. He decided that his only recourse was to run away, so that he might find his island. He left his parents’ home and started out, walking all night.

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As he continued his quest, he met a series of people who, after hearing of his desire, offered him their assistance. John’s first contact was with Mr. Enlightenment, who, when he learned that John was from Puritania, assertively declared that the Landlord did not exist and that the people of Puritania retained their beliefs because they were ignorant both of the real world and of the rich discoveries of science. After some time together, the two parted, but John continued his journey with great joy. He felt free from the Landlord, free of the rules, and best of all, free of the black hole. John met Vertue next, a young man of his own age and the two became companions in the journey. John learned that Vertue, though he lacked a clear destination, traveled thirty miles daily on the main road that led west. Vertue had no set of rules from the Landlord—he had made his own rules and he faithfully followed them. The two men separated when John desired to leave the main road. John detoured through Thrill and Eschropolis. In his detour John confronted Romanticism and Realism before being thrown into the dungeons of The Spirit of the Age. John was rescued by Reason and the two of them traveled together for a time before she put John back on the main road where he was reunited with Vertue. As night fell the two found that the road on which they were traveling ended at a precipice. While Vertue tried to convince John that they should attempt to climb down in search of a way to reach the other side, the two are visited by Mother Kirk. Her message to them was that they cannot cross on their own, they must have her assistance. The two young men refused her offer of help and traveled North in search of a way to cross the great canyon. They spent a night with Mr. Sensible and then began their journey again, accompanied by Drudge, Sensible’s servant. Although they met several other interesting characters, including warlike dwarves—the “Mussolimini,” the “Marxomanni,” and the “Swastici,” they found no way across the gorge. As they began to retrace their way southward, Vertue fell ill and became both blind and dumb. John led him along until they came to the house of Mr. Wisdom. After some days with Mr. Wisdom, Vertue was cured. He and John were separated as they left Wisdom’s house, and John found himself alone on a narrow ledge as night fell. He was given food by a mysterious man and was told where he could find water. In the morning he resumed his journey and came to a chapel where he met the Hermit, History. He spent the night in History’s cave, but after awakening from a nightmare he left, intent on going back, no longer forward. He met Reason and she drove him at sword-point on in his journey until he again found Mother Kirk, who told him that he must “give himself up.”5 She further told him that the way to cure death is to die. John and Vertue were

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stripped of their ragged clothes and dove into the pool that Mother Kirk indicated. The two emerged on the other side of the river, having crossed the canyon. There they were assigned a guide from whom they learned that the mountains ahead of them were the Eastern Mountains—the same ones that John as a child had seen from his home in Puritania. John also learned that his island was not an island at all; it was a part of the Eastern Mountains and that the only way to reach the mountains is by going back to where their journey began. They traveled back with their guide. On the way each battled and killed a dragon as part of his quest, and through their battles both John and Vertue gained strength of character. On their return trip, the land appeared very different than it had seemed when they first passed through; the difference, their guide explained, was because they were now able to see things as they really are. The two travelers also found that the return trip took far less time than did their original journey. When they arrived back at the now-dilapidated cottage where John had lived as a boy, John learned that his parents had longsince “passed over the brook.” He wept for all he wished he could have said to them that could not now be said. John and Vertue learned they too would cross the brook that very evening. The scene became too dark for the dreamer to see the actual crossing, but, as his dream ended, he heard the two men and their guide singing as they crossed the final brook. A SHORT EXPOSITION OF LEWIS’S ALLEGORY While one can find detailed explanation of the elements and characters represented in the works of several Lewis scholars, including Clyde S. Kilby and Kathryn Lindskoog, it seems fitting to discuss here at least some of the major characters and images in Lewis’s allegory. This listing is not meant to be exhaustive, but it is intended to serve as an aid for stimulating the reader’s own thinking and ability to understand the allegory of Pilgrim’s Regress. Characters Lewis scholar Doris T. Myers, in C. S. Lewis in Context, describes characters in Lewis’s allegory in terms of two types: humorous characters who can be recognized or identified by what they say, particularly in terms of some sort of a catch phrase that they repeated; and archetypal characters, who can be recognized by what they do.6 Mr. Broad would be an example of a humorous character, while Mother Kirk would be an example of an archetypal character. This distinction is helpful to the beginning reader of allegory and offers one method by which characters might be cataloged. Myers also offers

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her opinion that Lewis was more successful with his humorous characters than with the archetypal personages, whom she sees as sometimes being underdeveloped and reduced to serving only as alternate voices for the author.7 While this might be generally true, not all of the archetypal characters suffer from this flaw. Reason, for example, is a strong, fully developed character who plays a pivotal role in developing John’s evaluative powers. John Primary among the characters in Pilgrim’s Regress is John, the young man who follows the call of the island that takes him ultimately to the Landlord. John is obviously a portrait of Lewis himself, but Lewis also wants the story to be potentially the story of every person, hence the typical name of John for this character. Clyde Kilby states in Images of Salvation that, “in terms of the longing to find the source of the vision [the quest is] everyman’s.”8 Some critics go beyond this explanation and suggest that Lewis selected the name John for other reasons as well. Kathryn Lindskoog offers three additional reasons for the selection of John as the name for Lewis’s traveler. She suggests that it may be related to Lewis’s preference for being called Jack, a common nickname for John. She also suggests that Lewis may have chosen the name to honor John Bunyan and his allegory. Finally she suggests that Lewis may have selected John because of its meaning in Hebrew, literally “God has been Gracious.”9 However, no other scholars seem to attach such a wealth of reasons to the selection of a name for Lewis’s pilgrim. Mother Kirk One of the more misunderstood characters in the allegory is Mother Kirk, whom Lewis intends to represent Christianity itself. She describes herself as the Landlord’s daughter-in-law, which would be Lewis’s way of indicating the Christian tradition’s view of the Church as the “bride of Christ.” Many readers and critics see her, instead, as representing the Roman Catholic Church. Lewis’s own words make it clear that he did not intend Mother Kirk as a representative of Catholicism.10 The Steward The stewards in the allegory represent ministers who are to be keepers or stewards of the things of God in this world and his representatives to the people among whom they live and serve. The Landlord The Landlord is the character that in Pilgrim’s Regress represents God. He is the owner of all the land and it is he who has made the rules under which those in Puritania live. Vertue John’s companion on his journey is Vertue, which represents the human conscience, or the moral element of man. Mr. Broad This character represents the liberal church. He finds Mother Kirk out-of-date and suggests that one can perhaps better find God in the nature around him. Sigismund The character of Sigismund seems obviously a very thinly veiled representation of Freud. Freud is but one of many thinkers who appear in the catalog of characters found in Pilgrim’s Regress.

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Reason As one of the key archetypal characters of the allegory, Reason is an explicit character; that is, her name identifies Lewis’s intended reference. Although she is a powerful character—breaking the chains with which she is bound and slaying the Spirit of the Age to rescue John—her power is limited. She tells John, “I can tell you only what you know. I can bring things out of the dark part of your mind into the light part of it.”11 She also has an obvious flaw: she is without concern for John and his feelings.

Images The Grand Canyon Lewis uses the image of the great chasm, called by locals the Grand Canyon, to represent the consequences of Original Sin. The North This region represents the home of wrong thinking that overemphasizes what Doris Myers describes as “intellectuality and objective thought.”12 It is a region of cold, hardness, and barrenness in which feeling and emotion is repudiated as undesirable. The portrayal of the utter North as a wasteland is seen again in Lewis’s map of Narnia. The South This region represents the opposite kind of erroneous thinking, subjectivity, and elevation of the importance of the emotions. It is a region where feeling and emotion are heightened, and where the mystical and magical prevail. The land of Calormen in The Horse and His Boy carries this same aura of sensuality and perversion. The Island This represents the assumed object of John’s longing or desire. As the story unfolds, we find that the assumed object is not the real object of desire and cannot truly bring satisfaction to the seeker.

PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION OF THE PILGRIM’S REGRESS The Pilgrim’s Regress was initially published by Dent publishing and received praise in early reviews. Lindskoog reports that the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, who praised Lewis’s poetry, called his allegory “arresting” and noted that it had the ability to lift “the reader up.”13 G. S. Sayer, in a review for Blackfriars, praised Lewis’s successful “revival of the allegorical method,” noting that it permitted Lewis to “treat profound and complex things in a simple way.”14 Later reviews praised the book’s humor, its dialogue, and its content. Lindskoog notes that Bertrand L. Conway, in writing for Catholic World in 1936, called The Pilgrim’s Regress “a caustic, devastating critique of modern philosophy, religion, politics, and art.”15 Despite critical acclaim, initial sales of the book were disappointing. Many readers thought the book was obscure and difficult, while others found it unnecessarily combative and ill-tempered. Lewis confided to his friend Arthur Greeves in a June 1933 letter: “I think it is going to be at least as big a failure as

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Dymer.”16 Sales did increase when the book became a publication of Sheed and Ward, a Catholic firm, and Lindskoog details Lewis’s ire over the comments that the new publishers added, as they seemed to indicate that Lewis intended Pilgrim’s Regress to be an endorsement of the Roman Catholic faith.17 CRITICAL REVIEW AND ANALYSIS A Groundbreaking Work The Pilgrim’s Regress can be counted a groundbreaking work for Lewis on several levels. First, it marked Lewis’s first venture into fictional prose as well as Lewis’s inaugural publication of a book under his own name. Prior to The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis had published two books of poetry: Spirits in Bondage, a volume of early poems, and Dymer, a book-length poem. Although Lewis had hoped to be a successful poet, his name was not yet well recognized because these books had been published under the pen name of Clive Hamilton. While there is evidence from Lewis’s correspondence that he had begun a nonfictional autobiographical telling of his conversion before he wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress, it was never completed. Instead, Lewis wrote the prose allegorical tale that he considered not only an account of his coming back to God, but also an apology, or a defense, of Christianity. Secondly, The Pilgrim’s Regress is Lewis’s first work with a Christian theme. Telling the story of his conversion experience brought Lewis into contact with a new audience, one for whom he had not previously considered writing. Based on his use of a satirical style and his inclusion of a broad range of philosophies and intellectual issues, Lewis must have thought his book would appeal to only an elite, educated readership. However, it was read by some whom Lewis had not anticipated and continues to be read by a diverse audience today. Additionally, The Pilgrim’s Regress is Lewis’s first autobiographical work. Always a private man, Lewis was not intent on drawing attention to himself at this time; this is perhaps why the book is not directly an autobiography. While the book tells of Lewis’s coming to God, it lacks a one-to-one correspondence between the events in the journey of John and the events in Lewis’s life. The Pilgrim’s Regress, as an indirect autobiography, allows Lewis to convey the intellectual journey of his religious experience without all of the details of his life. Lewis’s choice of allegory permitted an objective distance than a more direct telling of his own story would allow. Lewis seems to underscore this point with his claim in the Afterword to the third edition that the book is not really intended to tell his life story. Finally, as Lewis’s earliest book-length work of fiction, The Pilgrim’s Regress serves as an introductory platform for many the themes and ideas that would

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resurface in his later works of both fiction and nonfiction. Joe Christopher, a biographer of Lewis’s, states, “The number of motifs and ideas in the Pilgrim’s Regress that reappear in Lewis’s later works indicates how quickly his ideas matured and how little they changed.”18 Structure and Style The Pilgrim’s Regress is organized into ten books, each of which is subdivided into several chapters. Each book is titled, as is each chapter, and an examination particularly of the chapter titles provides a window into the broad classical and cultural knowledge that Lewis possessed. While most of the titles of the books and chapters are fairly simple and without obvious connections to other writer’s works, the title of Book Three, “Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim,” does bring to mind the title of Henry Morton Stanley’s popular travel adventure Through the Dark Continent, which had been a favorite selection of many readers in the late nineteenth century. Such a title provides a look at the breadth of Lewis’s reading and knowledge. Titles such as “Ichabod” (Book I, chapter 5), meaning “the glory hath departed,” and “Leah for Rachel” (Book I, chapter 4), are obvious scriptural allusions. Other chapter titles, “Quem quaertus in Sepulchro? Non est hic” (Book I, chapter 6), (Whom do you seek in the sepulcher? He is not here.), or “Dixit Insipiens” (Book II, chapter 1), are portions of scripture quoted in Latin. The chapter titles reveal, however, more than merely the use of biblical allusions and quotations by Lewis. Several titles are quotations from, or titles of, works by philosophers and writers with whom educated readers would be familiar. For example, “Archtype and Ectype” (Book IV, chapter 2), refers to concepts taken up by John Locke in his 1690 work Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while “Esse is Percipi”—“to exist is to be perceived” (Book IV, chapter 3)—is drawn from Berkley’s Principles of Human Knowledge. In Book Five, “Table Talk” (Book V, chapter 5), the title echoes that of a well-known book by Martin Luther. Beyond quotations and titles are also allusions to literary characters such as the title “Let Grill be Grill” (Book IV, chapter 1), which recalls a character from The Faerie Queene, one of Lewis’s favorite works. Another feature of Lewis’s work that is visible with even a quick perusal of The Pilgrim’s Regress is the extensive use of epigraphs. Most of the ten books begin with not merely a single epigraph, but an entire page of these carefully selected quotations. As with the sources of chapter titles, the epigraphs exhibit a wide range of sources, including everything from lengthy quotations taken from classical authors such as Plato, Homer, and Pindar, to the single sentence of a popular police maxim. A careful consideration of the epigraphic

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selections and their relationships to the material that they precede certainly offers tantalizing potential for mining additional riches from The Pilgrim’s Regress. Equally obvious to even the casual reader is the plethora of quotations contained in The Pilgrim’s Regress. These quotations, like the epigraphs, cover a broad spectrum of writers and texts. However, not all are immediately comprehended by the contemporary reader because Lewis has introduced many of his quotations in Greek or Latin. This was, in fact, a criticism brought to Lewis’s attention by his friend Arthur Greeves, who apparently suggested that all of the Greek and Latin quotations be eliminated from the book. Lewis did not, obviously, do so. There are several accessible sources that offer translations of these quotations, including Kilby’s book, Images of Salvation. A more extensive coverage is Kathryn Lindskoog’s 1995 book, Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. An additional element that can be easily identified in the reading of The Pilgrim’s Regress is Lewis’s uncanny ability to create an alternate world, complete with geography. The description of the lands through which John passed is as rich and varied as is Lewis’s description of the people who John meets. A map of the lands in included with the book, printed on the endpapers. This well-formulated geography and cartography is not surprising, for even as a boy Lewis had created an elaborate geography as well as the history for his world of Boxen. Later, the topography of Narnia would not be left merely to the reader’s imagination, for Lewis would again provide rich description of its geographic features and would again create a map of the land to provide full orientation for readers. Readers’ responses to the so-called Mappa Mundi for The Pilgrim’s Regress was not, however, entirely positive. Many complained the map included numerous places John had never visited and regions that were not mentioned in the book. Despite the complaints, Lewis defended his map and considered it appropriate because it gave the full picture of John’s world and allowed readers to see additional places to which the erring pilgrim could have detoured. An additional stylistic element that Lewis employed was the interjection of poems or a song to break the prose format. The interjections occur sixteen times within the text, usually to focus a scene more sharply or to express an emotion more clearly. Some critics point negatively to this practice as a rupture of the allegorical form, but many of the poetic interludes in no way break the story or the vehicle of the allegory. The poems occur primarily in the later books of the allegory, and while they do require a “shift of gears,” most do not require the actual suspension of the story that would make them truly intrusive.

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Yet another device that Lewis employs is the use of satire. Over the course of the allegory he satirizes Freudian thought, Victorian romantic thinking, numerous philosophical and literary movements, and religion, by satirizing three types of Anglican churchmen. Mr. Angular represents the Anglo-Catholic, Mr. Broad represents the Liberal, and the Steward is Lewis’s portrayal of the Low-Churchman. Doris Myers succinctly describes Lewis’s religious satire by stating: “Mr. Angular’s futility, the Low Church Steward’s hypocrisy, and Mr. Broad’s lack of commitment all add up to a mordant criticism of religion.”19 Lewis’s satire is at times biting and seems almost vicious, yet it shows a penetrating intellect’s honest appraisal of the elements of his world. Pilgrim’s Progress and Pilgrim’s Regress It would be easy to look at The Pilgrim’s Regress and quickly conclude that the novel is modeled on John Bunyan’s well-known allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress; however, this would be an inaccurate assumption. While Lewis had read and enjoyed Bunyan’s work, the elements that the two works share, particularly the convention of setting the story as a dream, and the journey or quest motif are not unique to these works, but rather are common elements of Medieval and Renaissance allegories. In Lindskoog’s introduction to Finding the Landlord, she offers a list of additional examples of what are generally called visionary allegories, including The Romance of the Rose, a thirteenth-century work, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Like Lewis biographer Joe Christopher, I believe that The Pilgrim’s Regress probably most closely resembles the fourteenthcentury poem by Langland, Piers Plowman. Christopher notes that both weave strands of social satire and criticism, philosophical discussion, and what he calls “religious vision,” although not “in the same proportions.”20 Christopher hastens to add that he is not making “an argument of influence,” but merely noting that “the similarity is one of human experience.”21 The primary similarity in the works is their recounting the human experience of seeking for and finding God. Other Lewis scholars, particularly the late Clyde Kilby, do see a much more direct connection between The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Pilgrim’s Regress. In The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, Kilby directly identifies Bunyan’s work as the model for Pilgrim’s Regress.22 Chad Walsh makes a similar statement regarding Pilgrim’s Progress as a model for Lewis in The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis. U. Milo Kaufmann further explores the relationship between the work of Bunyan and that of Lewis, but his focus is primarily on their contrasting elements. Kaufmann notes that while Christian’s journey in Pilgrim’s Progress is “one way,” as he flees from the world to the celestial city, John’s journey is a “round-trip” as it were, in which he follows the longing that has served to call

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him to the Landlord, and then returns to “the community of men for witness and redemptive work.”23 Certainly this adds a new dimension to John’s pursuit of the island making it more than a mere acquisition of holiness. Themes in The Pilgrim’s Regress As Lewis’s first religiously themed work, it seems inevitable that The Pilgrim’s Regress should introduce concepts or thematic elements that would recur in Lewis’s later writings. What follows are examples of some themes that persist and reappear with progressive sophistication in Lewis’s later works. First, “There are none as blind as those who will not see.” While there are several passages in The Pilgrim’s Regress to which this idea can be applied, the clearest exemplification of the concept is found in Book Four, chapter one. Reason has just slain the giant, Spirit of the Age, and now turns her attention to the prisoners who remain in his dungeon. She breaks the lock, opens the door, and invites the prisoners out, but no one comes. While the open door stands before them, the prisoners refuse to exit. They believe that what they see is not real, merely the vision of what they hope for; they do not wish to be tricked or fooled, and so they do not gain their freedom. This theme reappears in the experience of the dwarfs in Lewis’s The Last Battle. Having decided that, “the dwarfs are for the dwarfs,” and that they will not be taken in by anyone, they refuse to see the glory of Aslan’s country before them. Aslan himself describes their condition saying, “Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”24 The dwarfs see none of the light, and experience none of the goodness that they stand within because they have closed their minds and their eyes to all but a concern for themselves. A second theme that resonates in many of Lewis’s later works is that of Sehnsucht, or longing. In The Pilgrim’s Regress, this longing can be seen in John’s yearning for the island. His desire is variously described as intense, thrilling, fleeting, and at times even painful because it remains unfulfilled. It becomes the driving force in his life and John desires the island so much that he leaves his home to pursue what has become his hunger and his thirst. This theme returns in Surprised by Joy, but the term longing has been replaced in that work by the term joy. Sehnsucht is identifiable in Lewis’s fiction as well. One image is that of Reepicheep, who desired the “utter East” and Aslan’s land all of his life. He completes his quest for them in the closing chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The idea of longing is again specifically identified by using the term longing in Till We Have Faces. Psyche speaks of the desire created in her by the distant Gray Mountain. She describes herself as “longing, always longing . . . Everything seeded to be saying, Psyche come!”25

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What causes a stimulation of sehnsucht does not remain constant throughout Lewis’s works, but mountains, gardens, and islands are all used at least once to represent the source of the longing, which is one of the most important themes found in Lewis’s works. A third theme in Lewis’s allegory is that we don’t see the world in the same way after conversion. This theme is made clear as John and Vertue begin their journey back to Puritania after their experience crossing the Grand Canyon. Their guide tells them that although they will be traversing the same land, it will no longer look the same to them. The house of Mr. Sensible is no longer there, and the appearance of the Valley of Wisdom is significantly altered. We may observe the same theme at work in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. There we see it evidenced in the changed vision of Edward after he has met Aslan. Following his encounter with the lion, Edmund sees for the first time the reality of the Witch, not the illusion of a queen. Even the land itself looks different to a changed boy. The same difference of perspective can be seen in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra as well, but in those works it is best observed by contrasting the vision of Ransom, a “new” man, with the vision of an “old” man, Weston. Where Ransom sees beauty and gentleness, Weston sees ugliness and threat. The world does indeed look different to those who have been given a new vision. Yet another theme that can be traced from its origins in The Pilgrim’s Regress is that we cannot change ourselves. We must give ourselves up to another in order to be changed. John comes finally to Mother Kirk and admits that he can do nothing. He gave himself up for a fundamental alteration that required nothing more on his part than letting go. When he stripped away his rags it caused some pain, and “a little skin came with them.”26 How like the experience of Eustace Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace, who had become a dragon, had no hope of returning to what he had been—a boy. Aslan effectively “undragons” Eustace by peeling off the dragon scales that cover him. The experience is not without pain, but it is necessary if there is to be any change in his condition. He too had to let go, and as he lay down before Aslan to let himself be descaled he did what was necessary for his healing. Lewis also presents us with the idea that God uses our desires to draw us to Him and we do not seek Him on our own. John had no interest in seeking the Landlord or in knowing him. Once he knew longing for the island, John gradually came to the place where all he could do was pursue his longing. He was willing to give up everything else to reach the island. Once he followed his quest, he ultimately learned that what he was truly seeking was God. The longing had served to awaken in John a desire that drew him to the Landlord. Lewis describes this same kind of drawing in Surprised by Joy. There he speaks

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again of a longing that was stirred in him that served to begin his movement toward God. Similarly, Jill Pole learns in The Silver Chair that she had not been brought to Narnia because she had called to Aslan, but that rather she called to Aslan because he had called to her.27 The theme of redemption is certainly central to The Pilgrim’s Regress, as it also is in The Chronicles of Narnia and other of Lewis’s works. John and Vertue are redeemed in their crossing over the Grand Canyon—they have their characters transformed. The evidence of their change is in part the new vision they have acquired and the new courage that each will use as he battles his own dragon. The theme of redemption resurfaces many times in Lewis’s later works, but a classic example of the theme as it occurs in the Chronicles of Narnia is Edmund’s redemption in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Edmund is both redeemed from the power of the White Witch by Aslan’s sacrifice and he is redeemed thematically as he repents of his evil and matures over the course of the adventure. Mark Studdock, the primary character in That Hideous Strength, offers yet another example of the redemption theme as he is saved from N.I.C.E. The struggle for Mark’s redemption is the central element of the story, and when he at last is convinced of the evil of Belbury he undergoes a thematic redemption similar to that of Edmund. Mark, too, matures and develops over the course of Lewis’s novel and ultimately becomes willing to die for what is right, as he obviously has changed from the arrogant young man he was at the beginning of the novel. A final theme to consider here is that our first steps of obedience make the way to God easier. John experiences this truth as he is confronted with a trail that offers no other option, and so he takes it on his descent to the floor of the canyon. As he climbed down, he found that the rock offered more handholds than he had expected and that the way down was easier than he had expected. Kilby describes this theme as a “first token move toward godly obedience and its resultant heavenly encouragement.”28 Jill Pole, in The Silver Chair, finds a similar ability to face her fears and a similar “heavenly encouragement” when she must pass by the lion if she is to satisfy her thirst at the stream. As she talks with the lion she takes her first steps toward the stream, then, although still fearful, she finds she is able to walk to the stream and drink before she answers the lion’s summons to come before him. Lewis seems to delight in reminding his readers that God always honors and encourages the steps that a seeker takes toward him. Critical Treatments of The Pilgrim’s Regress A contemporary criticism of Lewis’s work focuses on his choice of imagery. In Book One, he introduces the “brown girls,” who serve as John’s earliest

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substitute for the real object of his desire. The brown girl in the wood becomes John’s first sexual partner. Later another woman, named Media Halfway, entices John sexually during his visit to Thrill and is revealed to be merely another of the brown girls. In Book Two, John also refers to black girls as another unsuccessful substitute for “joy.” Some critics have seen Lewis’s choices of brown and black girls as both racist and imperialist. Certainly the imagery, like that of his dark Calormen villains, does not “play well” in the contemporary climate of tolerance and political correctness. Those who are embarrassed by Lewis’s imagery would do well to remember that it was an appropriate symbol at the time in which he wrote. One can only concur with Lindskoog that if Lewis were writing today it is likely that he would have chosen a different symbol for sexual desire, and that his choice would have been made out of a true sensitivity for what is right. We can assume that his choice made today would carefully avoid intolerance and prejudice.29 Chad Walsh levels a criticism at The Pilgrim’s Regress that is rooted in Lewis’s choice of his literary form. Walsh believes that all allegories suffer from characters that fail to “live” or which in some way do not come across to the reader as “real.” He would attribute this to the fact that the reader knows that each character merely represents something else, often an abstract idea, and that the reader’s knowledge makes it impossible to see the characters as compelling. The criticism seems to stem more from an antipathy on the part of Walsh toward allegory than in the reality of readers responses to Lewis’s characters, but it is certainly a potential problem, particularly among readers who do not have a taste for allegory. Doris Myers identifies what she sees as a significant weakness in The Pilgrim’s Regress, which she describes as “Lewis’s apparent refusal to face the woundedness of society between the [world] wars.”30 She considers John’s response to the Clevers, when they identify “the War” as the source of their disillusionment, to be harsh and cruel. John’s reply to them is, “That war was years ago. It was your fathers who were in it.”31 Myers argues that in light of the publication date, merely fourteen years after the war that many of his readers would have been veterans of, Lewis should have refrained from satirizing them. She believes that the weakness she finds in the work can possibly be traced to Lewis’s own ambiguity about his war experiences. While some of Lewis’s writings do indicate ambiguous feelings about the World War I and his experiences in it, it seems more likely that Lewis’s choice of words in John’s discussions with the Clevers is more the forcefulness of one who has found his life newly come right (the book was written after Lewis’s conversion), which can produce a sometimes unreasonable impatience with those who have not yet found their way past their experiences.

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An additional criticism may be described as the book’s “datedness.” Much of Lewis’s rich imagery is lost on those of today’s generation who do not read widely and who thus lack experience with the thoughtful reading required by allegory. This is further compounded by this generation’s lack of experience with classical languages, which makes Lewis’s Greek and Latin quotations interrupters rather than well-fitted elements that move his intended image forward. However, even though the book is in some ways a “snapshot” of thought in a particular era, the themes are certainly timeless; they would resonate as well with someone who is seeking God today as with the audience for whom Lewis wrote in the 1930s. A final criticism of The Pilgrim’s Regress is its breadth. There are so many images, so many characters, and so much that is satirized that the reader can be overwhelmed. The book might have proven more successful with a more narrow focus. Limiting the incidents would have allowed a greater depth of character development and produced an easier landscape for the reader to cross. This particular weakness is not surprising when one remembers that this was Lewis’s first work of fiction. Over time Lewis seemed to have learned to keep his stories more focused. The Continuing Value of The Pilgrim’s Regress In a society that often describes the value of a book by its continued popularity, there should be little argument that The Pilgrim’s Regress is a book of value. The most recent paperback edition was published by Eerdmans in 1992, nearly sixty years after the book’s initial publication. Another indicator of a book’s value is its “rereadability.” Can readers go back to the work and in rereading it find additional truth or wisdom? Lewis’s book most certainly seems to pass this test as well. The more readers return to this work the more they have been rewarded with increased understanding of and appreciation for the ideas that Lewis introduced. But what specific values does The Pilgrim’s Regress offer to the contemporary reader? First, the work is invaluable as a social history. Lewis draws a rich and full portrait of the “spirit of the times,” of the postWorld War I years—morally, intellectually, and religiously, cataloging the ideas that shaped thought and the men who had created the ideas. Because of the detail of Lewis’s writing, the catalog of characters is particularly rich. Although it is focused toward the world of academics, Lewis’s allegory raises within its context questions and issues that extend throughout popular culture. Reading the work as a cultural history will allow readers to return imaginatively to the interwar period and see what was taking place.

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Second, the work is invaluable as an autobiography. Although Lewis seeks to make John representative of everyone, it clearly remains his personal story throughout. It provides, ultimately, the story of Lewis’s own spiritual journey through the intellectual landscape of his times by which he finds faith, and in faith, the joy he was seeking. When read in tandem with Surprised by Joy, the book offers a richer vision of Lewis’s passage from unbelief to belief. Pilgrim’s Regress also offers an invaluable research tool for scholars who would investigate the development of an author’s prose style. As Lewis’s first novel, it provides a benchmark against which his later use of language, fluidity of expression, and ideas can be compared. While it allows scholars and ordinary readers to trace the development of themes first introduced by Lewis here and then later developed in his subsequent works, it also permits the study of his stylistic maturation. It gives us a measure of the thinking of Lewis as a new convert and as such provides an amazing picture of spiritual thought well underway to maturity. Although the story can be relatively quickly read, reaping the richness of the satire and the allegory requires more effort. But the depth of the riches that lie within The Pilgrim’s Regress will continue to be sought by future readers, especially those who, like John, have heard the call of the island and are determined to find the satisfaction of the longing it has created within them. NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 137–139. 2. Ibid., 140–143. 3. Dorothy Sayers, “The Writing and Reading of Allegory,” in The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 208. 4. C. S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 3. 5. Ibid. 6. Doris T. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), 22. 7. Ibid., 22–24. 8. Clyde S. Kilby, Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1978), 101. 9. Kathryn Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress (Chicago, IL: Cornerstone Press, 1995), 2. 10. For the full content of Lewis’s remarks see the final paragraph of “Afterword to Third Edition,” The Pilgrim’s Regress. 11. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 58. 12. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 13.

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13. Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord, 136. 14. Ibid., 135. 15. Ibid., 136. 16. C. S. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 454. 17. Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord, xxix. 18. Joe R. Christopher, C. S. Lewis (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987), 14. 19. Myers, Lewis in Context, 44. 20. Christopher, C. S. Lewis, 10. 21. Ibid. 22. Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1964), 36. 23. U. Milo Kaufmann, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Pilgrim’s Regress: John Bunyan and C. S. Lewis on the Shape of the Christian Quest,” in Bunyan in Our Time, ed. Robert G. Collmer (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1989), 194. 24. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 148. 25. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt, 1984), 74. 26. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 167. 27. C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 19. 28. Kilby, Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis, 101. 29. Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord, 27–28. 30. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 24. 31. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 41. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come. Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour, 1990. Carnell, Corbin Scott. Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1974. Christopher, Joe R. C. S. Lewis. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., Twayne, 1987. Duriez, Colin. The C. S. Lewis Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to His Life, Thought, and Writings. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books House, 1990. Glover, Donald E. C. S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment. Athens, OH; Ohio University Press, 1981. Green, Roger Lancelyn, and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Kaufmann, U. Milo. “The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Pilgrim’s Regress: John Bunyan and C. S. Lewis on the Shape of the Christian Quest.” In Bunyan in Our Time. Edited by Robert G. Collmer. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1989, 186–199.

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Kilby, Clyde S. The Christian World of C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964. ———. Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1978. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Galaxy, 1958. ———. The Last Battle. New York: Collier Books, 1970. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Collier Books, 1970. ———. The Pilgrim’s Regress. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992. ———. Selected Literary Essays. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. The Silver Chair. New York: Collier Books, 1970. ———. Spenser’s Images of Life. Edited by Alistair Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ———. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. ———. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963). Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1979. ———. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York: Harcourt, 1984. ———. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”. New York: Collier Books, 1970. Lindskoog, Kathryn. Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. Chicago, IL: Cornerstone Press, 1995. Manlove, C. N. C. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Myers, Doris T. C. S. Lewis in Context. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994. Piehler, Paul. “Visions and Revisions: C. S. Lewis’s Contributions to the Theory of Allegory.” In The Taste of the Pineapple. Edited by Bruce L. Edwards. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1988, 79–91. Sayers, Dorothy. “The Writing and Reading of Allegory.” In The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1978, 205–234. Schakel, Peter J. Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of “Till We Have Faces.” Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984. Walsh, Chad. The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

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Mere Christianity: Uncommon Truth in Common Language Joel D. Heck

INTRODUCTION “Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.”1 That’s how C. S. Lewis explains his purpose in writing one of the most influential Christian books of the twentieth century, Mere Christianity, the most important work of Christian apologetics he ever produced. This purpose helped to create “the supreme example of C. S. Lewis’s ability to make profound truths clear to everyone.”2 The term “mere Christianity” comes from the Protestant theologian Richard Baxter (1615–1691),3 a chaplain in one of Oliver Cromwell’s regiments. Lewis explains the meaning of Mere Christianity: “Measured against the ages ‘mere Christianity’ turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible.”4 In other words, Lewis was referring to historic Christianity, centered in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. By avoiding denominational distinctives, Lewis provides a guide to that common core of beliefs that nearly all Christian denominations have held since the first century a.d. Consequently, he avoids topics where there are differing views among Christians, such as the Sacraments, the Second Coming, worship, or the Virgin Mary. He uses the word

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Christian, not in the popular sense of a good person, but to refer to someone who accepts the teaching of the original disciples of Jesus5 and “one who accepts the common doctrines of Christianity.”6 In 1993, a Christianity Today poll named Mere Christianity the single most influential book for Christians, other than the Bible. Heading a list that included works by Oswald Chambers, John Bunyan, Francis Schaeffer, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mere Christianity was listed first for having the most significant impact on the Christian life. It drew more than twice as many votes as any other book.7 Mere Christianity is the first “good Christian book” that John Stott recommends in his book, Basic Christianity, and it is the most frequently mentioned work that influenced members of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Wesleyan Theological Society, though Lewis was neither an evangelical nor a Wesleyan.8 In the book Indelible Ink: 22 Prominent Christian Leaders Discuss the Books That Shape Their Faith (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2003), General Editor Scott Larsen puts Mere Christianity as the top book and Lewis as the top Christian author with Lewis mentioned more than three times more frequently than the next author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Obviously, what Lewis once wrote about his own feelings toward apologetics does not apply to his readers. On August 2, 1946, he wrote to Dorothy Sayers, “My own frequent uneasiness comes from another source—the fact that apologetic work is so dangerous to one’s own faith. A doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it.”9 The book has sold more than eleven million copies and helped turn around the lives of such well-known public figures as Charles Colson, author, founder of Prison Fellowship, and former legal counsel to an American President, and Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza.10 Mere Christianity gives us an introduction both to the thought and the writing style of Lewis. The thought is profound and the writing style plain English, the product of a skilled writer, a Christian layman, and a student of the English language. That, of course, is the necessary approach for material that was first written for radio. The radio listener does not have the opportunity to consult the dictionary, if a word is unfamiliar, so the speaker must use common language that will be understood by all. A good radio producer can detect those places where the writer is likely to lose his audience, and Lewis benefited in this way from the BBC’s Eric Fenn, Assistant Director of Religious Broadcasting. For the purpose for which Mere Christianity was written, then, the medium of radio served as a support. In 1946, Lewis wrote an essay later published by the Student Christian Movement under the title “Man or Rabbit?” In it Lewis argued that one of the distinctive characteristics of a human being was the desire to know things,

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particularly their truth claims. The question asked by some people of the day was whether they could live a good life without believing in Christianity. Lewis pointed out the fact that being good is not the essence of Christianity, but being remade, taking on the Divine Life, being transformed into a real person, a son or daughter of God, “drenched in joy.” People should not ask how helpful Christianity is, but how true it is! And if true, then the Materialist view, which places the good of civilization in prime position (since individuals live only a few decades), will be replaced by the Christian view, which places the good of the individual in prime position (since individuals actually live forever). And, in fact, the person who isn’t really interested in knowing about the truth of Christianity is afraid of considering that question because he is afraid that he will find out that it is true. Then he would have to change both his way of thinking and his behavior.11 Mere Christianity is not simply a book written in the common language; it is a book about truth. The book is autobiographical in the sense that it contains much of the thought process Lewis himself used in arriving at the conclusion that Christianity is true. For example, he used to believe, when he was an atheist, that most of the human race was wrong about the existence of God. Later, as a Christian, he didn’t have to believe that all other religions were completely wrong.12 Lewis’s argument against the existence of God when he was an atheist created a problem for him. Where had he gotten the idea that the universe was unjust? If the universe was senseless, why was he so opposed to it?13 Lewis’s own awareness of the problem of justice forced him to conclude that he must have gotten an idea of justice from some source outside of himself. “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”14 Later, Lewis alludes to what he calls “good dreams,” particularly those of a dying and rising god.15 This allusion takes us back to the time prior to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, when he had accepted the position of Sir James George Frazer, whose twelve-volume work, The Golden Bough, argued that Christianity was simply one myth among the many religions that taught of a dying and rising god. Late in Mere Christianity, Lewis talks about his own situation, where he realizes that the most obvious sin in his life is a sin against charity. He has sulked or stormed that day when he did not need to. And the best evidence for the kind of person you are is how you act when you are taken off guard.16 The book reflects another aspect of Lewis’s life in that Lewis uses in his apologetic writings the training that he received especially from W. T. Kirkpatrick. That training was substantially a relentless search for truth, and it influenced Lewis for the rest of his life. Conversation frequently became disputation, whether that conversation took place with friends or opponents. Former student John Lawlor once wrote, “One quickly felt that for him

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dialectic supplied the place of conversation.”17 Such an approach prepared Lewis for apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith and a task that is in essence disputative. AT THE BBC DURING WORLD WAR II The book Mere Christianity, published in 1952, originated as four series of broadcasts over the BBC from 1941 to 1944 (see the Appendix to this chapter). When Lewis was invited to speak over the BBC, the British Broadcasting Company was less than twenty years old. Founded in 1922 and incorporated in 1927, “the early BBC fully adopted Christian values.”18 This would explain their willingness during World War II to invite such a noted Christian speaker as Lewis. Under Reverend F. A. Iremonger, Director of Religious Broadcasting, the BBC had begun to introduce into its religious programming lay speakers during the 1930s, including such leading lights as New Testament scholar, C. H. Dodd.19 Rather than simply broadcasting worship services and church music, the BBC wanted to provide the listening audience with relevant, Christian programming. Then Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and Great Britain declared war on September 3. During the war the BBC was also anxious to raise the morale of the people. Lewis was one of those who could speak in his rich baritone voice with power, clarity, and relevance, becoming the second most well-known radio voice in England after Winston Churchill. In a setting where television, cinema, theater, and other places of entertainment closed because of the war and where newspapers became scarcer due to paper shortages, radio became the most important and strategic method for delivering information to the British people and for maintaining the nation’s morale. The only restriction on radio time was the broadcast plans of the programmers, which had to be censored in order not to lower the morale of the country or inadvertently give valuable information to the enemy.20 This created a situation that made the BBC the voice of the entire nation during the war, which writer J. B. Priestley described as “something as important to us in this war as an army or navy or air force.”21 Justin Phillips wrote, “It was not just a battle for the mind and morale of a nation at war. For the religious broadcasters, it was a battle for the soul.” Reverend James Welch, Director of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC, read Lewis’s book, The Problem of Pain, which was published in 1940, and was impressed by the lucid mind, the clarity of writing, and the powerful ideas. This led him to contact Lewis about appearing on the BBC, especially in view of the topic of Lewis’s book. The book was published at an opportune time. In

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July 1940, Hitler had given Reichsmarschall Goering orders to destroy British air power, and in August the Battle of Britain had begun. On September 7, German bombers attacked London. The Blitz struck London over the next nine months and, at one point, for fifty-seven consecutive days. The Blitz ended on the night of May 10–11, 1941, the worst night of the Blitz and just a few days after Lewis had his microphone test in preparation for his first series of BBC broadcasts.22 It’s no wonder that Lewis could write, “Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics.”23 The war informed Lewis’s broadcasts, not only in providing a part of the motivation for raising the nation’s morale, but also in his choice of language. The broadcasts contain numerous words from the battlefield, on average more than one such reference per page. The Christian life involves the believer in spiritual warfare, so the comparison is apt. For example, Lewis uses the word war eighty times in his broadcasts, the word surrender eight times, the word soldier sixteen times, and a total of more than two dozen different terms in all.24 Welch wrote to Lewis at Magdalen College on February 7, 1941, inviting him to do a series of talks from a Christian perspective on either the underlying assumptions of modern literature or the Christian faith as Lewis saw it. The smaller number of undergraduates at Oxford University during the war seems to have made it possible for Lewis to accept, but the larger number of students as the war drew to a close made it hard for Lewis to accept future invitations to speak over the BBC. Lewis responded positively on February 10, preferring a series of talks during his summer vacation on the topic of the Law of Nature, that is, an objective standard of right and wrong. The New Testament assumes an audience that believes in the Law of Nature, but we can’t assume that for modern England. His hope was “to create, or recover, the sense of guilt” that was mostly absent in England.25 The person in charge of producing religious talks, Eric Fenn, Assistant Director to James Welch, booked Lewis for four weeks, starting on August 6, the date that became the first of twenty-five broadcast talks that Lewis would give. They settled on the title, “Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe?” Lewis sent the first two scripts to Fenn by June 3, and Fenn replied, “I think they are excellent and there is very little that any of us wish to suggest about them.”26 Though the talks were well-written, Fenn still wanted Lewis to do a script rehearsal and read-through, so he wrote to Lewis on July 31 with an invitation to do so. His concern was that Lewis might speak too quickly or too slowly, and he wanted to be prepared. Lewis had never broadcast before,27 and the medium of radio allows for no dead time. The day of the first broadcast arrived, and Lewis faced the unenviable position of following the 7:30 p.m. news broadcast in Norwegian! While the

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Norwegian broadcast provided an important public service to a part of the listening audience, apparently no one had thought about the sequence of the programs. The problem was solved later, and Lewis never again followed the news in Norwegian. In spite of the schedule, Lewis’s rich voice, fluency, command of the English language, passion for his topic, and the powerful content of his ideas all combined to produce an excellent broadcast. Listeners apparently agreed, for many letters began to pour in to the BBC.28 A request from Fenn for a second series of five talks had arrived before the first series was over. As soon as the four series were completed, a request came to the Overseas Religious Broadcasting Officer of the BBC from Australia for Lewis to rebroadcast all of his talks.29 Several years later, a request originating with Charles Taft, President the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), came from the United States. A BBC officer in their New York office, Lillian Lang, wrote, “Apparently his new approach to religious subjects is causing considerable interest in this country.”30 She was requesting a script of one of his talks and a list of topics he had covered in the hope of being able to include a talk by Mr. Lewis in a network program of the FCC. But Lewis never did rebroadcast any of his talks. THE APPROACH In spite of the tremendous influence his writings have had, Lewis downplayed his role, stating, for example, about his BBC talks, “Mine . . . attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable and also (unless you add the Christian doctrine of the Atonement) that this imparts despair rather than comfort.”31 His role was to convince the skeptic that there was a moral law and that the existence of the moral law suggested a deity behind that law. He saw his writings as only a shadow of God’s work. In his Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis spoke of God’s work in nature when he wrote that narrow anti-Christian dogmatism “. . . exaggerates the distinctness between Grace and Nature . . . and . . . makes the way hard for those who are at the point of coming in.”32 In other words, Lewis argues as Paul argues in his Epistle to the Romans that “the natural man” knows certain things about God by nature and sees those truths echoed in nature. Consequently, to understand Lewis as an apologist, in Mere Christianity and elsewhere, we must see the connection between his role and the role of nature. For Lewis, nature will point people to God. Lewis’s role is to make that connection more explicit, to nudge the sleeping imagination, to point out the vague longing for something greater than oneself.

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But there is more that Lewis does with this vague longing. Not only does he point it out, but he also sharpens that longing so that people might see the one thing that satisfies, Jesus Christ. He had found in his own life that only Christ could satisfy his longings, and a biblical theology affirms the same thing. Writes Lewis, “Has not every object which fancy and sense suggested for the desire, proved a failure, confessed itself, after trial, not to be what you wanted? Have you not found by elimination that this desire is the perilous siege in which only One can sit?”33 But first, the reader, or listener, has to understand that things are not right between him and God. Lewis writes, “We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.”34 In England in the 1940s, Lewis felt, “A sense of sin is almost totally lacking.”35 He chose to use the common language to communicate truth. “My task was therefore simply that of a translator—one turning Christian doctrine, or what he believed to be such, into the vernacular, into language that unscholarly people would attend to and could understand.”36 He believed that if speakers and writers could not translate their thoughts into common language, then their thoughts were confused.37 In some places, he would use the vehicle of storytelling. “The inhibitions which I hoped my stories would overcome in a child’s mind may exist in a grown-up’s mind too, and may perhaps be overcome by the same means.”38 And he would allow the story to do its own work. “I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination.”39 His strategy was no different for adults than for children. These stories, he hoped, would awaken the Law of Nature in both children and adults.40 Story allows the storyteller to convey profound truth in easily understood concrete language, which is not the natural language of the apologist. Around 1955, Lewis wrote the essay, “The Language of Religion” in which he argued that there was no specifically religious language, as there was a scientific language or a poetic language. He explained one of the reasons for his effective use of analogy in apologetic writings such as Mere Christianity, stating that the apologist cannot do effective apologetic writing in concrete language, but must use the abstract. This creates a problem, since most people have difficulty with abstract language. Lewis solved this problem in Mere Christianity, not by the use of stories, but by the use of analogy.41 Analogies have the same ability that stories have, enabling the writer to set aside abstract language in favor of concrete terms. Though primarily an apologist, Lewis at times takes on the role of an evangelist, for example, when he tells his readers that the biblical message can start to make a difference for them tonight.42 Likewise, when he invites readers to imagine themselves standing in the presence of God,43 he wants them to think of the importance of their relationship to Him.

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BOOK ONE: “RIGHT AND WRONG AS A CLUE TO THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE” After three unsuccessful attempts,44 Lewis and the BBC finally settled on a title for the first series of broadcast talks, later known as Book One of Mere Christianity. The title was “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” In short, when Welch invited Lewis to speak on the BBC, Lewis proposed as his topic the Law of Nature. He wanted to awaken a consciousness of sin in the listener, something that could not be taken for granted in the England of the 1940s. Christianity would be mentioned only at the end.45 In chapter one, “The Law of Human Nature,” Lewis presents two basic ideas, that there is a Moral Law that people know they should obey and that they break that Law. Chapter two, “Some Objections,” deals with the fact that this Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is neither instinct nor social convention. In chapter three, “The Reality of the Law,” Lewis argues that the Law of Human Nature is not to be compared to the law of gravitation, which is only a description of what always happens when something is dropped. The Law of Human Nature is a law that is real and that tells us what humans ought to do rather than what they in fact do. Lewis writes, “A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first. I am not angry—except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses—with a man who trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed.”46 Chapter four, “What Lies Behind the Law,” addresses the two major views of the universe—the materialist view and the religious view. The matter of the Moral Law is not materialistic and therefore not subject to science, for it is not a scientific question. The religious view has the advantage that we are able to look inside ourselves. We can observe our conviction that there is a moral law, which we should obey; and that there is Something behind the law, which is directing the universe and urging us to obey that law. That Something is more like a mind than anything else. Chapter five, “We Have Cause to be Uneasy,” encourages the reader to turn back if she is going in the wrong direction. It offers two pieces of evidence about the Something behind the universe, that is, the universe itself and the Moral Law. They tell us that this Something is a great artist, since the universe is beautiful, and that He is interested in right conduct. It is best to recognize our failure to obey this law, and Christianity will make no sense to people who do not realize that. We must go back to go forward.

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As the first series of broadcasts concluded, Fenn wrote a letter of thanks to Lewis: My dear Lewis, I warned you as I bade good-bye that we should make a more formal expression of our gratitude to you by post, and this is meant to be it! We should like you to know how extremely grateful we are for these five talks and for your promise of further talks at a later date if we can find a suitable time. I do think the talks were really good. The only one that seemed to me to be turgid was the second, which was in many ways the most difficult. Last night’s I thought was an excellent finish.47

BOOK TWO: “WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE” When Fenn read the scripts for the second series, he wrote to Lewis, “I think they are quite first class—indeed I don’t know when I have read anything in the same class at all. There is a clarity and inexorableness about them, which made me positively gasp!”48 The third broadcast, entitled “The Shocking Alternative,” more than any other, “established Lewis’s reputation as a Christian apologist of the first rank.”49 In a section later removed from the published talk, Lewis provided an introduction to the second series, since he was unable to assume that listeners remembered his first series, which had ended four months earlier: It’s not because I’m anybody in particular that I’ve been asked to tell you what Christians believe. In fact it’s just the opposite. They’ve asked me, first of all because I’m a layman and not a parson, and consequently it was thought I might understand the ordinary person’s point of view a bit better. Secondly, I think they asked me because it was known that I’d been an atheist for many years and only became a Christian quite fairly recently. They thought that would mean I’d be able to see the difficulties—able to remember what Christianity looks like from the outside. So you see, the long and the short of it is that I’ve been selected for this job just because I’m an amateur not a professional, and a beginner, not an old hand. Of course this means that you may well ask what right I have to talk on the subject at all. Well, when I’d finished my scripts I sent them round to various people who were professionals: to one Church of England theologian, one Roman Catholic, one Presbyterian, and one Methodist. The Church of England man and the Presbyterian agreed with the whole thing. The Roman Catholic and the Methodist agreed in the main, but would have liked one or two places altered. So there you’ve got all the cards on the table. What I’m going to say isn’t exactly what all these people would say; but the greater part of it is what all Christians agree on. And the main reason why I couldn’t alter it so as to make them agree completely was that I’ve only got 15 minutes for each talk.

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That doesn’t give you time to make many subtle distinctions. You’ve got to go at it rather like a bull in a china shop or you won’t get through. One thing I can promise you. In spite of all the unfortunate differences between Christians, what they agree on is still something pretty big and pretty solid: big enough to blow any of us sky-high if it happens to be true. And if it’s true, it’s quite ridiculous to put off doing anything about it simply because Christians don’t fully agree among themselves. That’s as if a man bleeding to death refused medical assistance because he’d heard that some doctors differed about the treatment of cancer. For if Christianity is true at all, it’s as serious as that. Well, here goes . . .50

The four clergymen to whom Lewis sent these scripts were probably former student Dom Bede Griffiths (Roman Catholic), RAF friend Reverend Joseph Dowell (Methodist), his BBC producer Reverend Eric Fenn (Presbyterian), and Reverend Austin Farrer (Anglican), chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford University.51 In the first chapter of Book Two, “The Rival Conceptions of God,” Lewis divides all of humanity into those who believe in God or gods and those who don’t. Christianity is in the majority by maintaining a belief in God. Then Lewis divides those who believe in God according to the sort of God they believe in—the Pantheists and the Theists. In the latter category, he includes Jews, Muslims, and Christians. If one adopts a pantheistic view of the world, Lewis argues, then one can’t complain about injustice. For the Pantheist, God is a part of the world, God permeates the world, and God almost is the world. That drives one to the conclusion that what we call evil really can’t be evil; after all, it’s God. If there truly is a good and a bad, then “you must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.”52 Chapter two, “The Invasion,” whose title shows the influence of World War II, addresses the Incarnation. The rightful king has landed in enemy-occupied territory, but in disguise, and He is inviting us to join Him in a campaign of sabotage. That is the Christian view. The other view that Lewis also addresses, and demolishes, is Dualism, the view that there are two equal powers, one of them good and the other bad. The universe is the battlefield, and these two powers are at war with one another. The moment you judge one of these powers “good” and the other “bad,” you are using a standard above both powers and saying that one power conforms to that standard while the other does not. And the source of that standard is God. Furthermore, goodness can be experienced for its own sake, while badness cannot. No one likes badness just because it is bad, but because of something they can gain by it. Badness is parasitic, only able to function by corrupting that which is good. Therefore, badness looks much more like it came from an originally good, but now fallen, creature than from an eternally existent being that is on a par with goodness.

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The Principal of Manchester College at Oxford University, Nicol Cross, a Unitarian, didn’t like the logic of Lewis in one of his talks. He said at a meeting of the Socratic Club on November 11, 1946 that “he must allude to the ‘vulgar nonsense’ that ‘a man who said the things that Jesus said, and was not God would be either a lunatic or a devil.’”53 He was quoting Lewis’s BBC address, entitled “The Shocking Alternative,” first delivered on February 1, 1942, an address that later became chapter three of Book Two in Mere Christianity. Elton Trueblood, professor of philosophy and chaplain at both Stanford University and Earlham College, had a much different and more accurate perspective on this most powerful chapter: “In reading Lewis I could not escape the conclusion that the popular view of Christ as being a Teacher, and only a Teacher, has within it a self-contradiction that cannot be resolved. I saw, in short, that conventional liberalism cannot survive rigorous and rational analysis.”54 In this chapter, Lewis presents what is often referred to as the Free Will Defense. God could not create a world of love and goodness without creating creatures that could freely give or withhold such love. To eliminate free will would be to create robots instead of people. Lewis addresses the fall of Satan, the flaw in human beings, and God’s solutions—He gave us a conscience, good dreams (stories that seem to anticipate the Christian religion), and the Jewish people. One of those Jewish people claimed to forgive sins, and that leads us to the shocking alternative: either Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, or the Son of God. Chapter four, “The Perfect Penitent,” describes fallen mankind in need of repentance, and in this chapter Lewis pictures repentance as a kind of death. The problem is that only a bad person needs to repent, but only a good person can. The worse a person is, the less capable she is of repenting. But God has solved that problem for us in sending His Son to endure death in our place so as to pay our debt of sin. The fifth and last chapter in this book, “The Practical Conclusion,” tells us that the suffering and death of Christ have made possible a new kind of person for those who believe in Him. Baptism, belief, and the Lord’s Supper convey that Christ-life to us. And one day, in the practical conclusion of all things, God will land in force rather than in disguise. BOOK THREE: “CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOR” In chapter one, “The Three Parts of Morality,” Lewis describes moral rules as “directions for running the human machine” rather than attempts on God’s part to spoil people’s fun. Then he discusses the three aspects of morality as: (1) relations between people, (2) what’s inside an individual, and (3) the purpose of human life, or relations between people and God. Most people think of morality as the first part, relations between people, but the second

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and third parts need to be considered also. The third aspect of morality, rarely discussed in most circles, is important because people will last forever while civilizations will not. “The Cardinal Virtues,” or pivotal virtues, are four—prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. God wants a child’s heart but a grownup’s head, so He wants prudence, or common sense. He wants people to take the path of moderation rather than excess, so He wants temperance. He wants fairness, or justice, and He wants courage, or fortitude. Why? For three reasons, which correspond to the three aspects of morality from chapter one: (1) so that we will learn to do the right thing for the right reason, (2) so that we will develop into the right sort of person, and (3) because these virtues are necessary for the next life as well. Chapter three, “Social Morality,” presents the Golden Rule, “treat others as you wish to be treated.” Christianity does not provide a particular political program, but a sense of direction and a source of energy. God wants everyone to pull their own weight, no manufacturing of unnecessary luxuries, no advertisements to convince us that we need those luxuries, obedience to authority, giving to the poor, sacrificial giving, and a development of the inner self through a relationship with God. In chapter four, “Morality and Psychoanalysis,” Lewis agrees that Freud was correct in attributing some of our behavior to the subconscious. When Freud became an amateur philosopher, however, and espoused a particular worldview, Lewis disagreed. Morality has to do with choices people make, but psychoanalysis has to do with the feelings and impulses that sometimes cause our choices to go wrong and not at all with the moral choices we make. Most important of all, however, Lewis argues that every choice we make changes us from what we are, causing us to become either more of a heavenly creature or more of a hellish creature. Chapter five, “Sexual Morality,” is not the center of Christian morality, in spite of what some people think. Christianity thoroughly approves of the body, for God took on a human body in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and Christianity has produced nearly all of the great love poetry. Sexuality is part of God’s creation, so God is in favor of the appropriate practice of our sexuality. Given our warped natures, however, propaganda has convinced many that we are sexually starved and need to indulge our senses. The evidence around us is that the sexual appetite grows by indulgence, just as any other appetite does. The evidence of jealousy, lies, deceit, disease, impotence, and other problems suggests that the indulgence of the past has not solved any problems of the sexual instinct, but has actually made them worse. Therefore, the Christian practice of marriage, or complete faithfulness to your spouse, or abstinence is the best road to sexual health.

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Chapter six, “Christian Marriage,” discusses three types of “love”: (1) infatuation, (2) the initial sense of “being in love,” and (3) the deep unity and commitment that lasts. This third type of love is the engine by which the marriage runs, while “being in love” is the explosion that starts the marriage. Lewis correctly places sexuality within marriage as one type of union that should not be isolated from the other types of union that come with marriage. Few have accepted his view that there be two kinds of marriage, one governed by the State and the other governed by the Church, but Lewis attempts to recognize that Christians make a different commitment in marriage than those who are not Christian. Chapter seven addresses the topic of “Forgiveness,” a topic that Lewis calls even more unpopular than chastity. How does one forgive one’s enemies? How can a Pole or a Jew forgive the Gestapo? Two things make it easier—start by forgiving a member of your family and learn the meaning of loving your neighbor. One can hate bad actions without hating the person, or, as Lewis writes, “hate the sin but not the sinner.” Lewis tells us that we do that to ourselves all the time, loving the self while disliking our pride, or our greed, or our cowardice. Christians realize that each thought or action changes the central part of us and moves us more toward being a heavenly creature or a hellish creature. To love our enemy is not to feel fond of the enemy or to be nice to the enemy, but to wish good to the enemy. After all, God loves us, and we don’t really have much in us that is lovable. “The Great Sin” is the topic of chapter eight. That sin is pride, the center of Christian morals, and its opposite is humility. Few see the problem in themselves, and most detest it in others. Pride is “the complete anti-God state of mind.” Pride is competitive by nature, and that is why it is the chief cause of misery in people’s lives, but also the chief reason why people turn away from God. “As long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” Lewis also addresses misconceptions about pride: (1) Pleasure at being praised is not pride, provided that the praise doesn’t result in causing you to think how wonderful a person you are to have done what you did. (2) Being proud of others is a step away from pride, which is a very self-centered thing. (3) God is not concerned about His dignity, so He does not forbid pride for His own sake. He forbids pride because He wants us to know Him. (4) Humility does not result in a smarmy person, but in someone who is truly interested in you. Chapter nine, “Charity,” covers the first of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity. While the term now means giving to the poor, it originally meant something much wider, that is, “Love, in the Christian sense.” Charity is a state of the will, that of willing good to someone else. We need not fear that we don’t feel loving; we must simply act as if we did. The

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feelings will follow the actions. The same is true of our love for God. We must act as if we did, and we will find that we soon feel the same way. But although our feelings for God may come and go, God’s love for us is always steadfast. Chapter ten, “Hope,” addresses the second theological virtue with this stunning statement: “the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.” Hope is not escapism or wishful thinking; it is “a continual looking forward to the eternal world.” “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”55 Our tendency is to think of this world and to fail to notice the longings that point to another world. The fool blames people and things, the disillusioned person learns not to expect too much, but the Christian understands that these longings, or desires, which cannot be satisfied by anything in this world, mean that we were made for another world. In chapter eleven, “Faith,” Lewis addresses faith in its first sense, that of believing or regarding as true the teachings of Christianity. Lewis says that his faith is based on reason, but people don’t always make decisions on the basis of reason. Reason and faith are often opposed by emotion and imagination. The habit of faith needs to be developed so that we learn to hold on to our faith in spite of our changing moods. Before Lewis addresses the second sense of faith, he wants us to know that the idea that most people have at one point or another—that we might be able to earn a passing mark on God’s exam or somehow put God in our debt—will never happen. In chapter twelve, “Faith,” talks about faith in the second sense. When we despair of our own efforts and leave our spiritual condition in the hands of God, we put our trust in Christ and discover that He offers something for nothing, in fact, that He offers everything for nothing. Lewis goes on to discuss the relationship between faith and good actions, attempting to chart a middle course between them, thereby avoiding the heart of the issue and arguing that we need both to lead us home. It would have been best for him to say that it is not faith plus works that saves, but a faith that works. BOOK FOUR: “BEYOND PERSONALITY: OR FIRST STEPS IN THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY” Chapter one, “Making and Begetting,” compares theology to a map. While doctrines are not God, nor the experience of God, they are a map that is based on the experiences of many people who knew God. Therefore, theology has the very practical value of being able to provide directions. It provides directions that avoid the popular idea that Jesus Christ was merely a great moral teacher. Christ is the Son of God, who can enable us to become sons of God, but in a different sense than He is. Begetting results in something of

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the same kind, because a human being begets a human being and God begets God. When God enables us to become sons and daughters of God, He is making us, not begetting us, into sons and daughters of God, which Lewis compares to statues or pictures of God. We become like God, as a statue is like a person. This making us into sons and daughters of God occurs because God adds spiritual life (Zoe) to our biological life (Bios).56 We are thereby changed, as a statue would change if it became a real person. “This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”57 Chapter two, “The Three-Personal God,” explains the doctrine of the Trinity as God being more than personal rather than less than personal, or impersonal. The illustration of a three-dimensional figure serves as “a sort of faint notion” of a super-personal God, that is, Father, Son, and Spirit. That biblical picture of God isn’t anything we could have made up, because people would have made a simpler picture. For us to know God, He has to take the initiative. And He has. Chapter three, “Time and Beyond Time,” is a chapter that Lewis invites the reader to skip, if the reader has no interest in the topic. He addresses the problem of how God can answer the prayers of millions of people at the same time. His answer? God is not in time and therefore has all of eternity to answer the millions of prayers that come to Him at any given moment. God is like a novelist who leaves a story he is writing to answer the door. The character’s action stops when the novelist lays down the pen or when the reader lays down the book. Time has stopped for the character at that moment, and that is similar to God’s state of timelessness. All moments are now for God. Chapter four, “Good Infection,” explains how God makes people into little Christs. This happens by the work of the third person, the Holy Spirit, who delivers to us spiritual life, Zoe, much like a germ or virus infects us with disease, except that this infection is a good infection. This infection allows us to share in the life of Christ. In chapter five, “The Obstinate Toy Soldiers,” Lewis compares the making of sons of God to the turning of a tin soldier into a real person. The problem is that we are self-centered and don’t want to be turned into sons of God. A tin soldier would be self-centered also, not wanting to become a flesh and blood person because he would see that as killing him. He would cease to be made of tin and would then be made of flesh. God solved this problem in the Incarnation when God became an actual human being, thereby becoming what all people were intended to be. He not only showed us what we could become; He made it possible for us to become sons and daughters of God by being killed and then rising again. If we open ourselves to the possibility of being transformed, then God will turn our biological life (Bios) into a

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spiritual life (Zoe) with that “good infection” mentioned in the previous chapter. Chapter six, “Two Notes,” answers two questions raised as a result of the previous chapter. The first question: If God wanted sons and daughters instead of toy soldiers, why didn’t He just make lots of sons and daughters in the first place? After all, the process of becoming sons and daughters is so difficult and painful. The first answer to this question is that our turning away from God long ago made this becoming of sons and daughters into a difficult process. People could turn away because God made us with a free will. He made us with a free will because to do otherwise was to create robots instead of people capable of love and, therefore, of infinite happiness. The second answer to this question states that it is nonsensical to ask, when talking of God, if it could have been otherwise. We will never know, and the speculation does no good. In response to the second question, which had to do with the value of the individual versus the value of the whole, Lewis argues both that we do belong to the whole human race and that individual differences do matter. Christianity wants individuals to share their uniqueness with others and complement them in the same way that the different bodily organs complement one another. That’s one of the reasons for differences. These differences do not allow us to ignore someone else’s problems because they aren’t our business; in fact, they belong to the same organism, the human race. Therefore, we should avoid both errors—neither becoming an Individualist who ignores the human race nor becoming a Totalitarian who ignores individual differences. In chapter seven, “Let’s Pretend,” Lewis opens with the story of a man who wore a mask to make himself look nicer than he really was. After many years of wearing the mask, the man took off the mask and discovered that his face had taken the shape of the mask and was now quite handsome. In the same way, living like a son of God is pretending, because we know at the time that we really aren’t sons of God. So we dress up as Christ. Pretending can be either good or bad. It is bad if it is a sham or a pretence, designed to cover up the real thing; it is good if the pretence leads to the real thing and actually helps us to get there. The real Son of God is gradually turning us into real sons and daughters of God. He concludes the chapter with two points—what we are is more important than what we do, since our deeds flow from our character, and God is the one who actually does the pretending, since He is at work in us. Chapter eight expresses its purpose by its title, “Is Christianity Hard or Easy?” The answer is “both.” It is hard because Christ tells us to take up our cross, and it is easy because Christ says that His yoke is easy and his burden is light. The hard thing is that our natural self is constantly looking to have its own way, while God wants to kill that natural self and give us a brand new self.

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Chapter nine, “Counting the Cost,” builds on chapter eight by telling us that the only help that Christ wishes to give is help to enable us to become perfect. God is like the dentist who wants, not to ease the pain of a toothache, but to eliminate the problem. Lewis cites George MacDonald who wrote, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”58 God will be delighted with our first feeble steps, much like the parent is with the young child. But God will not stop there. Where we think that He wants to remodel us just a bit, God wants to do a great work in our lives and reshape us into palaces. And that hurts, but it’s a good hurt. In chapter ten, “Nice People or New Men,” Lewis responds to the objection that all Christians should be obviously nicer than all non-Christians. Christianity makes people nicer, but you can’t divide all people into two camps. Although most would disagree with Lewis, he argues that some are in the process of coming to Christianity, and others are leaving it. Furthermore, some people have niceness because of their upbringing or their innate God-given temperament. Consequently, some non-Christians will be nicer than some Christians. However, the Christian will be nicer than she would have been without Christianity, and the non-Christian will not be as nice as he could have been with Christianity. The real problem is that this entire discussion suggests that the essence of Christianity is niceness, or that Christianity is something that nasty people need and nice people do not. That’s not true. The crucial thing is whether people will offer their natures to God. The crucifixion of Christ made that possible, but we can turn away from giving our natures to God. The paradox is that only those things that we give to God are the things that really belong to us. Chapter eleven, “The New Men,” concludes the book. God wants transformation rather than improvement. How does He accomplish that? Not through some evolutionary or gradual process, not through sexual reproduction, but through the good infection of the nature of Christ into us. This is voluntary, Lewis writes, not because we choose it but because we have the opportunity to refuse it. And it comes like a flash of lightning. New men and women are all over the world right now. When the One who is beyond personality takes over our lives, we become more truly ourselves. “Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”59 PUBLICATION AND REVIEWS Before Mere Christianity was published, the individual BBC talks were published in separate volumes. The first two series of talks, “Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” and “What Christians Believe,” were published as Broadcast Talks (Bles, 1942),60 the third as Christian Behavior

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(Bles and Macmillan, 1943), and the fourth as Beyond Personality (1944 in the United Kingdom by Bles, 1945 in the United States by Macmillan). Reviews appearing in 1942 demonstrate the general opinion of the listening, or reading, public to the first two series of talks. The Tablet wrote, “We have never read arguments better marshaled and handled so that they can be remembered, or any book more useful to the Christian . . . who finds himself called upon to argue briefly from first premises, to say why morality is not herd-instinct, why there is a special and unique character attached to the sense of obligation, why the conviction that there is a law of right and wrong and a transcendent morality is only intelligible if there is a God.” The Times Literary Supplement said, “No writer of popular apologetics today is more effective than Mr. C. S. Lewis.” The Clergy Review carried G. D. Smith’s opinion: “The author shows himself a master in the rare art of conveying profound truths in simple and compelling language.”61 When Christian Behaviour was published, reviewers were equally enthusiastic. Robert Speaight wrote for The Tablet, “Mr. Lewis is that rare being—a born broadcaster; born to the manner as well as to the matter. He neither buttonholes you nor bombards you; there is no false intimacy and no false eloquence. He approaches you directly, as a rational person only to be persuaded by reason. He is confident and yet humble in his possession and propagation of truth. He is helped by a speaking voice of great charm and a style of manifest sincerity.” A reviewer for The Guardian wrote, “His learning is abundantly seasoned with common sense, his humor and his irony are always at the service of the most serious purposes, and his originality is the offspring of enthusiastically loyal orthodoxy.”62 The reviewers of Beyond Personality were just as effusive as those who reviewed the previous publications of portions of Mere Christianity. A reviewer wrote for The Times Literary Supplement, “Mr. Lewis has a quite unique power of making theology an attractive, exciting and (one might almost say) an uproariously fascinating quest . . . Those who have inherited Christianity may write about it with truth and learning, but they can scarcely write with the excitement which men like . . . C. S. Lewis show, to whom the Christian faith is the unlooked-for discovery of the pearl of great price.”63 CONCLUSION Mere Christianity contains uncommon truth in common language. It is uncommon truth because of the power of Lewis’s ideas, all of them reflecting biblical teaching, and it was common language because of the style in which Lewis wrote, his drawing upon universal human longing, and his use of analogy and the war in which Europe was at the time engaged. Few writers

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have the capability of presenting profound truth in exceedingly clear language, but Lewis is one of those. As Lewis wrote in his essay, “Christian Apologetics,” “Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age.”64 The timeless is uncommon truth, and the language of the age is common language.

APPENDIX This table provides a quick overview of the original broadcast dates and themes Lewis performed that became the work known as Mere Christianity. BBC Broadcast Title

Date

Chapter Title in Mere Christianity

Series 1: “Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” (Wednesdays from 7:45 to 8:00 p.m., August 6 through September 6, 1941). This became Book 1 in Mere Christianity, and the chapter numbers are designated after the chapter titles. Common Decency

August 6, 1941

Scientific Law and Moral Law

August 13, 1941

Materialism or Religion

August 20, 1941

What Can We Do about It?

August 27, 1941

Answers to Listeners’ Questions

September 6, 1941

The Law of Human Nature, chapter 1 The Reality of the Law, chapter 3 What Lies Behind the Law, chapter 4 We Have Cause to Be Uneasy, chapter 5 Some Objections, chapter 2

Series 2: “What Christians Believe” (Sundays from 4:45 to 5:00 p.m., January 11 through February 15, 1942). This became Book 2 in Mere Christianity. First Talk

January 11, 1942

Second Talk Third Talk

January 18, 1942 February 1, 1942

Fourth Talk Fifth Talk

February 8, 1942 February 15, 1942

The Rival Conceptions of God, chapter 1 The Invasion, chapter 2 The Shocking Alternative, chapter 3 The Perfect Penitent, chapter 4 The Practical Conclusion, chapter 5

Series 3: “Christian Behavior” (Sundays from 2:50 to 3:00 p.m., September 20 through November 8, 1942). This became Book 3 in Mere Christianity. Some of the chapters in Mere Christianity were never broadcast (chapters 2, 6, 9, and 10).

(continued )

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BBC Broadcast Title

Date

First Talk

September 20, 1942

Second Talk Third Talk

September 27, 1942 October 4, 1942

Fourth Talk

October 11, 1942

Fifth Talk Sixth Talk

October 18, 1942 October 25, 1942

Seventh Talk Eighth Talk

November 1, 1942 November 8, 1942

Chapter Title in Mere Christianity The Three Parts of Morality, chapter 1 The “Cardinal Virtues,” chapter 2 Social Morality, chapter 3 Morality and Psychoanalysis, chapter 4 Sexual Morality, chapter 5 Christian Marriage, chapter 6 Forgiveness, chapter 7 The Great Sin, chapter 8 Charity, chapter 9 Hope, chapter 10 Faith, chapter 11 Faith, chapter 12

Series 4: “Beyond Personality: The Christian View of God” (Tuesday evenings from 10:20 to 10:35 p.m., February 22 through March 30, 1944). This became Book 4 in Mere Christianity. Some of the chapters in Mere Christianity were never broadcast (chapters 3, 6, 9, and 10). Making and Begetting

February 22, 1944

The Three-Personal God

February 29, 1944

Good Infection The Obstinate Toy Soldiers

March 7, 1944 March 14, 1944

Let’s Pretend Is Christianity Hard or Easy?

March 21, 1944 March 28, 1944

The New Man

April 4, 1944

Making and Begetting, chapter 1 The Three-Personal God, chapter 2 Time and Beyond Time, chapter 3 Good Infection, chapter 4 The Obstinate Toy Soldiers, chapter 5 Two Notes, chapter 6 Let’s Pretend, chapter 7 Is Christianity Hard or Easy? chapter 8 Counting the Cost, chapter 9 Nice People or New Men, chapter 10 The New Men, chapter 11

NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins 1980), viii. 2. Walter Hooper’s comment in the Foreword to Justin Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), vi.

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3. See Baxter’s Church History of the Government of Bishops, published in 1680. For more information, see N. H. Keeble, “C. S. Lewis, Richard Baxter, and ‘Mere Christianity,’” in Christianity and Literature XXX(3) (Spring 1981), 27–44. 4. C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” 203. 5. Lewis, Mere Christianity, xv. 6. Ibid., xii. 7. Michael G. Maudlin, “1993 Christianity Today Book Awards,” Christianity Today (April 5, 1993): 27f. 8. Mark Noll, “C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’ (the Book and the Ideal) at the Start of the Twenty-first Century,” SEVEN, An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2002): 35. 9. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, 2, 730. 10. Justin Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC, 295. 11. C. S. Lewis, “Man or Rabbit?” 108–110, 112. 12. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 35. 13. Ibid., 38f. 14. Ibid., 39. 15. Ibid., 50. 16. Ibid., 192. 17. John Lawlor, C. S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections, Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Company, 1998, 3. 18. Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC, 15. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Ibid., 6, 33. 21. Ibid., XI. 22. Ibid., 86. 23. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 32. 24. By my count Lewis uses the following words: battle (4x), invasion/invade (4x), force (20x), Allies (once), march (2x), Gestapo (2x), army (4x), blow to bits (3x), soldier (16x), war (80x), ration (21x), battle/battlefield (4x), enemy (22x), fight (16x), struggle (once), German/Germany (4x), Nazi (3x), infantry (once), sabotage (once), rebel/rebellion (9x), surrender (8x), arms (7x), conquest (2x), conquer (2x), Jews (7x), smuggle (2x), and military (once) for a total of 247 World War II references. 25. Lewis, Collected Letters, 2, 470. 26. Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC, 88. 27. Ibid., 111f. 28. Ibid., 124. 29. Mr. R. S. Lee wrote to Lewis about this on October 3, 1944. Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC, 262. 30. This request came to the BBC in London on June 16, 1948. Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC, 272. 31. Lewis, Collected Letters, 2, 484f. 32. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, 207.

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33. Ibid., 155. 34. C. S. Lewis, “God in the Dock,” 244. 35. C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” 95. See also “God in the Dock,” 243. 36. C. S. Lewis, “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger,” 183. 37. C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” 98. 38. C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” 38. 39. George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis, Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1988, 318. 40. For more information on this topic, see my chapter, “Praeparatio Evangelica,” in C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands. 41. C. S. Lewis, “The Language of Religion,” 136, 141. 42. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 187. 43. Ibid., 217. 44. First, Lewis suggested “The Art of Being Shocked,” or “These Humans,” then “Inside Information.” Phillips, 85, 91. 45. A letter dated February 10. 1941, Collected Letters, 2, 470. 46. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 18. 47. Written on September 4, 1941. Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC, 129. 48. Ibid.,141. 49. Ibid., 147. 50. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996, 306f. 51. Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC, 142. 52. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 37. 53. The Socratic Digest, 4, 103. 54. Elton Trueblood, While It Is Day: An Autobiography, New York: Harper & Row, 1974, 99. 55. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 134. 56. Zoe and Bios are Greek words for “life,” with the former denoting a spiritual kind of life and the latter denoting biological life. 57. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 159. 58. Ibid., 203. 59. Ibid., 227. 60. Bles, 1942. Published by Macmillan in the United States as The Case for Christianity (1943). 61. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide, 327. 62. Ibid., 327. 63. Ibid., 328. 64. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” 93. BIBLIOGRAPHY Heck, Joel D. “Praeparatio Evangelica.” In C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands. Edited by Angus Menuge. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997, 235–37.

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Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996, 303–328. ———. ed. C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume 2. Books, Broadcasts, and War 1931–1949. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004. Lawlor, John. C. S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections. Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Company, 1998. Lewis, C. S. “Christian Apologetics.” In God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 89–103. ———. “God in the Dock.” In God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 240–44. ———. “The Language of Religion.” In Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967, 129–141. ———. “Man or Rabbit?” In God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 108–113. ———. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 1980. ———. “On the Reading of Old Books.” In God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 200–207. ———. The Pilgrim’s Regress. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992. ———. “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger.” In God in the Dock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 177–83. ———. “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said.” Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1966, 35–38. Maudlin, Michael G. “1993 Christianity Today Book Awards,” Christianity Today 37(4) (April 5, 1993), 27f. Noll, Mark. “C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’ (the Book and the Ideal) at the Start of the Twenty-first Century.” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2002), 31–44. Phillips, Justin. C. S. Lewis at the BBC. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1988. ———. The Socratic Digest. Oxford: Oxonian Press and Basil Blackwell, 1942–1952. Trueblood, Elton. While It Is Day: An Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

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4

The Sermons of C. S. Lewis: The Oxford Don as Preacher Greg M. Anderson

“Where God gives the gift, the ‘foolishness of preaching’ (I Corinthians 1:21) is still mighty.” —C. S. Lewis1 Their outstanding qualities as sermons or addresses are more easily catalogued than imitated. The clear distinctions, careful arguments, pellucid clarity, fertility of illustrations, pithy epigrams, the deep wisdom and insight into the will of God and the nature of man, the candidness that is piercing, the presentation of central themes and abiding issues, as well as the loyal exposition of ageless and unpopular religious and moral truth, are some of the eminent characteristics. —Horton Davies on Lewis’s sermons2

Few preachers have their inaugural sermon printed in a book called Famous British Sermons.3 During World War II, a reluctant preacher and a full-time Oxford don, C. S. Lewis, pushed preaching to the highest levels of artistic and aesthetic discourse. Ralph Turnbull, in A History of Preaching, noted that C. S. Lewis’s occasional sermons “were given rapt attention” because he was a “devout layman whose intelligence matched his spirituality.”4 Lewis preached sermons that deserve a place in any study of great twentieth century preaching. James Como writes, “Lewis delivered only a handful of sermons, but they made history in their day.”5

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In his first broadcast talk, Lewis was careful to point out that “I am not preaching.”6 Horton Davies wrote that “Lewis is cast more congenially in the role of apologist than of preacher.”7 But Lewis’s longtime friend Owen Barfield noted that Lewis took on different roles over his career as tutor, scholar, apologist, and fiction writer, and we might best understand Lewis by recognizing that there were actually three “Lewises,” or possibly even five.8 Lewis “the preacher” could be a contender for the sixth Lewis. Most of the attention to the genius of Lewis has been paid to his roles as a writer, a critic, and an apologist. Lewis was a polymath, but in the midst of everything else he did he was also a preacher. Any comprehensive treatment of Lewis needs to make room for his sermons. Great preaching is rarely found. Seldom do sermons attract attention as great artistic expression. What was it about Lewis that made him such an exceptional preacher? To answer that question, we will look at the place of preaching in the life and work of Lewis and consider some of his key sermons. Most of his sermons were composed and delivered during what I call Lewis’s “Fabulous Forties,” from around 1939 to 1946. Only one sermon will be examined after this period, and we will notice how the feast of the Forties became a “Fifties Famine,” as Lewis came to compose and deliver fewer new sermons. LEWIS’S PREPARATION FOR PREACHING Lewis developed his speaking and debating ability during his childhood years in school and especially under the exacting rigor of his private tutor William Thompson Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis famously called “The Great Knock.” His tutorials at University College, Oxford, as well as membership in the “The Martlets,” the literary society at Oxford, further developed his speaking skills. As his career unfolded as a don at Oxford, he was expected to deliver a yearly schedule of university lectures, which afforded him the opportunity to hone his public delivery techniques. When his religious writings propelled him into the public eye, there were ample opportunities for Lewis to give Christian talks to public societies, Royal Air Force stations surrounding Oxford, and eventually on the BBC radio. It is clear that the lessons he learned by speaking to a university audience carried over into his preaching before public audiences. Charles Gilmore, the head of the RAF chaplain’s school, recalls the first time Lewis spoke to a room of future chaplains: At first, however, my worst fears looked as if they were being confirmed. To these men, probing life in the raw and trying to do something about it, [Lewis] chose to speak on “Linguistic Analysis and Pauline Soteriology.” Worse, if you can imagine it, he seemed to be feeling for words. Clive Staples Lewis feeling for words! He hummed, and the

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ill-mannered coughed. A future bishop secretly got on with The Times’ crossword. But Lewis knew his men. He suddenly said something about prostitutes and pawnbrokers being “Pardoned in Heaven, the first by the throne,” and the rest of the morning was full of the clang of steel on steel and the laughter of good fellows, and answers that belonged to life.9

Though Lewis accepted invitations to speak as a Christian explaining the beliefs and practices of Christianity, he did not see himself as a preacher. A strong case can be made that Lewis considered preaching his war work. In the preface to his 1944 sermon “Transposition,” he bemoaned the “too numerous addresses I was induced to give during the late war.”10 As almost all of his sermons were preached during World War II and its immediate aftermath, Erik Routely reminds us that “Lewis’s main work was not preaching: he would do it if asked, but what he probably did more comfortably was more informal.”11 Comfortable or not, as the war began, Lewis began to receive more and more invitations to speak, and he did not turn them down.12 His friend J. R. R. Tolkien thought Lewis took up wartime speaking as a sort of penance: He took it up in a Pauline spirit, as a reparation; now the least of Christians (by special grace) but once an infidel, and even if [Lewis] had not persecuted the faithful, he would do what he could to convert men or stop them from straying away. The acceptance of the RAF mission, with its hardship of travel to distant and nasty places and audiences of anything but the kind he was humanly fitted to deal with, lonely, cheerless, embarrassed journeys leaving little behind but doubt whether any seed had fallen on good soil; all this was in its way an imitation of St. Paul.13

Lewis and Tolkien shared similar standards for what constituted a good sermon. Tolkien’s idea was that “good sermons require some art, some virtue, some knowledge. Real sermons require some special grace which does not transcend art but arrives at it by instinct or ‘inspiration’; indeed the Holy Spirit seems sometimes to speak through a human mouth providing art, virtue and insight he does not himself possess: but the occasions are rare.”14 Lewis’s view, as expressed in The Screwtape Letters, was that in a successful sermon there was a partnership between divine revelation and human listening, which “lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment . . . This attitude, especially during sermons, creates this condition . . . in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul.”15 But like Tolkien, Lewis found that great preaching rarely happened. Through a humorous caricature of two preachers in The Screwtape Letters, we glimpse Lewis’s lamentation on the dearth of adequate preaching in his day: Vicar is a man who has been so long engaged in watering down the faith to make it easier for a supposedly incredulous and hard-headed congregation. . . . In order to spare the laity all “difficulties” he has deserted both the lectionary and the appointed

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psalms and now, without noticing it, revolves endlessly round the little treadmill of his fifteen favourite psalms and twenty favourite lessons. We are thus safe from the danger that any truth not already familiar to him and to his flock should ever reach them through Scripture. At the other church we have Fr. Spike. The humans are often puzzled to understand the range of his opinions—why he is one day almost a Communist and the next not far from some kind of theocratic Fascism16

Lewis was a perceptive consumer and critic of sermons. When attending his parish church, Holy Trinity, in Headington, Lewis and his brother Warren listened to good and bad sermons. In 1939, when Warnie was away, Lewis would score the preaching of the curate from “a really excellent discourse” to “a sermon by Blanchett not all at his best.”17 Any preacher would dread hearing this description from “The Sermon and the Lunch”: as he spoke I noticed that all confidence in him had departed from every member of the congregation who was under thirty. They had been listening well up to this point. Now the shuffling and coughing began. Pews creaked; muscles relaxed. The sermon, for all practical purposes was over; the five minutes for which the preacher continued talking were a total waste of time—at least for most of us.18

We could say that Lewis had a traditional and high view of preaching and the role of the sermon, and that when communicating the faith, Lewis strove to have his sermons encompass both apologetics and preaching. Though Lewis was much more comfortable as a writer, broadcaster, debater, and as a religious lecturer, in effect he was an apologist for the Christian faith in a variety of media. James Como reminds us that “not all preaching is necessarily apologetic, of course, but all (Christian) apologetic has about it an aspect of preaching.”19 Lewis was an eloquent defender of the faith, but it may be that he saw himself as more of a “pre-preacher” or a “para-preacher,” as one who offered intellectual and imaginative assistance to the preacher who could also get at his listener’s emotions. While participating on a roster with some of the great preachers in England during a September, 1945, Tom Rees’s “This Is the Victory” Crusade, which attracted three thousand people a night,20 Lewis noticed in some sermons “an appeal of a much more emotional and also more ‘pneumatic’ kind has worked wonders on a modern audience. But best of all is a team of two: one to deliver the preliminary intellectual barrage, and the other to follow up with a direct attack on the heart.”21 Proclamation of Christianity requires both an appeal to the head and the heart, and it became clear to Lewis that his job was to provide the intellectual softening of the head that would work in tandem with a more spiritual and emotional appeal to the heart.

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A PROPOSITIONAL AND PICTORIAL PREACHER What is puzzling in Lewis’s preaching is his lack of explicit biblical references. He was biblical in his theology but the biblical texts seldom made it into his sermons. If one is looking for biblical exegesis and exposition as the core content of competent preaching, Lewis fails the test. Horton Davies compares C. S. Lewis to the other great university preacher of his day, Bernard Word Manning: “Manning is convinced that the only right that he has to proclaim the Gospel is by submitting himself to the discipline of understanding, obeying, and expounding the Revelation of God in Holy Scripture. His sermons are all expository, whereas Lewis’s are topical.”22 Lewis saw himself as the person speaking to those on the fringes of the faith. These occasions required propositional argumentation, rather than Scriptural proof-texts. However this argumentation has echoes and paraphrases of Scripture at every turn. Lewis also saw the need for imaginative and ethical appeals to reach the will as well as the mind of his audience. Lewis is well known for his rational defense of the faith and also for his imaginative and creative works and his most rational works contain word pictures, analogies, and artistic use of language that complement what is rather standard or “mere” Christian orthodoxy. Lewis was able to combine the propositional and the pictorial in a way that few preachers have before or since. He did not discard rational and logical discourse and adopt the irrational and illogical world of supersubjectivity. Jolyon Mitchell, a former BBC producer who now teaches homiletics at the University of Edinburgh, builds a case for “a discourse which engages the listener multi-sensorially.” He develops the theological justification for such discourse around the “embodiment principle” and the “translation principle.”23 It is small surprise that he uses the radio addresses of C. S. Lewis as an illustration of visual, pictorial preaching. Mitchell is a representative of what has become known as the “New Homiletics,” with its move away from rhetoric to poetics, and from persuasion to art. The shift from propositional and rational argument has been an emphasis on narrative and homiletical moves that create discourse, which pushes preaching beyond the proverbial “three points and a poem.” The “New Homiletic” might be in response to a failure of nerve in preachers in postmodernity, or it might be an attempt to compete with a media-sated audience. Lewis, however, would not find himself in comfortable company with the New Homilecticians. He believed in both proposition and picture, both rhetoric and poesis, both persuasion and story. It was what made him so distinctive. He combined reason, imagination, passion, ethics, and an uncanny sense of audience. A later examination of his sermons will demonstrate how

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this gifted part-time preacher used the “foolishness of preaching” with a mighty power. SOME COMPLICATIONS WHEN CONSIDERING LEWIS’S SERMONS This essay limits itself to the addresses Lewis preached in churches in the context of a worship service. Most of the sermons to be considered can be classified as apologetic in nature, but it will be helpful to bear in mind that Lewis was a genre-jumper when composing his sermons. Lewis roamed widely among a variety of verbal genres, from lecture, to debate, to sermon, to eulogy, and would sometimes mix the Aristotelian genres of deliberative, judicial, and ceremonial oratory all into one address. Bryan Hollon finds that “the literary category, ‘Christian apology,’ transcends the definition of apology found in [classical] rhetorical handbooks. A second-century Christian apology does not necessarily take the form of judicial defence. Rather, second-century Christian apologies . . . are united in their concern to justify and clarify Christian beliefs and practices in the midst of a culture that misunderstands them.”24 Historians of rhetoric and preaching find that the Christian sermon is derived from the Jewish Midrash and the Greek funeral oration. Chaim Perelman claimed, “the funeral sermon of the Greeks was transformed by Christianity into a means of edification.”25 The sermon is a blended or hybrid genre from the start and Lewis further blurred rhetorical and homiletical distinctions in his practice. As a twentieth-century apologist, Lewis found himself using all three classical genres as he defended the faith. He asked people to make decisions and choices and raised ceremonial appeals to a new level in sermons such as “The Weight of Glory.” Like his early Christian forbears, he sought “to justify and clarify Christian beliefs and practices in the midst of a culture that misunderstands them.” No one seems to know how often Lewis preached. Even with the paper trail Lewis left behind, it is difficult to find out the exact number of times he preached. Douglas Gresham, when asked how often his stepfather gave a sermon, responded, “Lots.”26 Personal accounts of the frequency and locales for Lewis’s preaching differ. Fred Paxton, Lewis’s handyman and chauffeur, claimed that when Lewis “preached at Quarry Church, it was always packed.”27 However, the church administrator at St. Mary’s, the Quarry Church, did not think that Lewis had ever preached there. The rector thought that he might have but the parish record had been turned over to the county and could not be inspected. In his diary, dated March 31, 1946, Warren Lewis wrote, “To Evensong in our own Church, where [Lewis] preached an excellent sermon, illuminating for me an old difficulty of my own. He began by speaking of the doubts which

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some of us feel about the wording of the Book of Common Prayer.”28 Lewis’s brother’s account confirms that he preached there and tells something about what Lewis spoke about.29 A little more detective work determines that Lewis addressed this same concern the next Sunday. On April 7, 1946, he preached “Miserable Offenders” at St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton, and it was later published in a booklet, Five Sermons for Laymen.30 A cryptic comment Lewis made in a letter to Alec Vidler dated August 17, 1941, shows that Lewis himself was not in full command of his speaking schedule: Dear Vidler, I preached two sermons in St. Mary’s and can’t remember which was on which date. If the one you’ve got is on Rev. ii 26–28 beginning ‘If you asked twenty good men’ I shd. be glad for it to be printed in Theology. The Weight of Glory was the title. If on t’other hand it is a sermon on Faith beginning ‘We are all quite familiar’, then I fear it already bespoke.31

Lewis himself could not reconstruct his preaching so soon after the event, and it has remained just as difficult to do so some sixty years later. “The Weight of Glory” is Lewis’s most famous sermon, but what about the “bespoken” sermon on faith? We have the text to the sermon “Religion: Reality or Substitute,” but we don’t know where it was it preached.32 The leading candidate would be at St. Mary’s church, yet there is no record of Lewis ever preaching at the university church, since the Register of Service book from St. Mary’s from 1938–1944 is missing.33 Lewis preached at least four times at his parish church but we have no manuscript for his March 29, 1942 sermon “Religion and ——— ” or even a title to his February 18, 1945 sermon.34 There is a possibility that “Religion: Reality or Substitute” was the later title for “Religion and ——— ” preached first at St. Mary’s and then later at his parish church. As there is no exhaustive list of his sermons, we will restrain ourselves from further pining for Lewis’s lost preaching. LEWIS’S FORTIES PREACHING FEAST Though we are not able to reconstruct Lewis’s sermon manuscripts, many of them were transformed into essays. On at least two occasions, and much later in life, Lewis added more material to the essays than was in the sermons. As we look into the biographical context of his life, we find that he was working on many writing projects at the time he was preaching. In effect, Lewis used sermons as trial balloons. The most obvious one is the sermon “Miracles,” which was ultimately transformed into a book by that same title.

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It is clear that ideas from his sermons were to find more permanent expression in his later writings. In the preface to Transposition, he understates, but at least states, the case: “In one or two places they seem to repeat, though they really anticipated, sentences of mine which have already appeared in print.”35 What follows are discussions of some of Lewis’s sermons. For each sermon, indicated by its title and the date on which Lewis delivered it, I will provide some context for the work and then consider the text of the sermon itself, followed by a brief discussion of its reception. Learning in Wartime, December 22, 1939 Context Lewis’s inaugural sermon was preached at St. Mary’s the Virgin in Oxford on October 22, 1939.36 The vicar of St. Mary’s, the Reverend Theodore Milford, had read Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress and was impressed. Because of the uncertainty facing Oxford undergraduates during the war, Milford capitalized on the facts that Lewis was an Oxford don who had fought in World War I. Milford arranged for everyone present to have a mimeographed copy of the sermon bearing the title “None Other Gods: Culture in WarTime.”37 Erik Routley was present at the service and gives this account: But on the second Sunday of the first term of the war, in October, 1939, I saw that he was billed to preach in the University Church. It was odd enough in those days to have a preacher who wasn’t a clergyman of the Church of England, and I thought I would go along. The service was to begin at 8:00 p.m., and I supposed I arrived at about ten minutes before eight. There was hardly a seat to be had. The one I got was right under the pulpit. I could see the preacher only when he was going up the steps. And I said to myself, “So that’s Lewis!” The church was dim. Only minimal lighting was allowed. Most of us had to sing the hymns from memory. But Lewis gave us the sermon called “Learning in Wartime,” which was, I suppose, his debut as a preacher. “A Syrian ready to perish was my father,” from Deuteronomy 26, was his text.38

Routley is right, as far as existing evidence indicates, that this sermon was Lewis’s debut as a preacher. Several weeks before he preached the sermon, Lewis revealed in a letter to his brother his determination to continue as a scholar, even though he lost his university lectureship because of the war. He claimed to have found “the perfect summing up of [his] personal war aims” in an Anglo-Saxon chronicle: “During all this evil time Abbot Martin retained his abbacy.”39 Text The goal of the sermon was to encourage the young scholars of Oxford to continue their studies despite the war, and at the same time to use the

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war to put larger spiritual issues in focus. The critical question he posed was: “What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing?”40 Lewis continues to ask how scholars can continue their “placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberty of Europe are in the balance. Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?”41 Horton Davies, in the best commentary on this sermon, finds it “jeweled with witty epigrams.”42 His example is Lewis’s turning the table on Nero: “But to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell.”43 Lewis claims that the heaven or hell question puts the war in a proper puny perspective. “The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived at the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist in the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.”44 He claims that “life has never been normal” and gives historical examples of good work done in extreme situations: “They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec.”45 He made a case for culture, even in times of crisis, but only in the sense of Christian vocation. “The work of Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly ‘as to the Lord.’ ”46 He went on to admit “we are all members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own. A man’s upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, is usually a tolerable index of his vocation.” He then pointed out that since his listener’s parents had sent them to Oxford, and the country had allowed them to stay, “the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.”47 After making a case for the learned life, Lewis listed three distractions that could keep the scholar from fulfilling his vocation: excitement, frustration, and fear. He ends by noting that the war has shattered false ideas about human culture and that “the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter.”48 Reception Ashley Sampson, one of Lewis’s publishers, remarked that Lewis “put out a feeler for that light which is all that we can see as yet of the world that is ahead of us” in this sermon “preached at a dramatic moment in the world’s history.”49 The sermon was a paean to Christian vocation in general and

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scholarship in particular. Several years after Lewis gave the sermon, Sampson remarked: There can be no doubt that Dr. Lewis is a phenomenon. His “arrival” among intellectual starts at a moment when Europe had plunged into a Second World War was rather like a fairy-tale . . . Our hopes had been changed to bitterness and men were asking themselves what God was doing when C. S. Lewis (a lay don of literary reputation who had once been a rather cynical atheist) preached a sermon in the University Church that set all Oxford, and later all England, talking.50

The sermon’s original title was changed to “Christians in Danger” and first published as a pamphlet by the Student Christian Movement in 1939, and was included in anthology entitled Great English Sermons. In a February 18, 1940, letter to his brother, the new preacher’s pride and wit are both at work: Did I tell you that someone wants to include that St. Mary’s sermon of mine in a collection of (save the mark) Famous Sermons? I am divided between gratification and a fear that I shall be merely made a fool of by appearing in the same book as Bede, Latimer, Donne, Taylor, etc. However, I hope that I shall be divided from them by some good 19th century duds!51

Sampson was in no small measure responsible for getting the word out. He was Lewis’s publisher of The Problem of Pain and he would include the sermon in a sermon anthology. The sermon was first a mimeographed sheet, then a SCM pamphlet, and with a few changes,52 a chapter in a book. Lewis included it, in his Transposition and Other Addresses and it has been reprinted in a variety of collections ever since. The Weight of Glory, June 8, 1941 Context On Sunday, June 8, 1941, Lewis made his second foray as a preacher at St. Mary’s53 ; the result was a sermonic masterpiece, based on 2 Corinthians 4:17. He mounted the pulpit where John Wesley started the Methodist movement and Newman the Tractarian. “The Weight of Glory,” was preached at an evensong at the Oxford University church, St. Mary the Virgin to “one of the largest crowds assembled there in modern times.”54 Lewis never learned to drive, so his handyman Fred Paxton drove him to the church and managed to find a place to park and to sit. Paxton recounted the sermon to Walter Hooper, “Gor Blimey! Mr. Jack didn’t give half of it to em.”55 Rosamund Rieu Cowen wrote: “I was in St Mary’s the night he gave his address on ‘The Weight of Glory.’ It was marvelous. But you see when I

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was a young student at Oxford although I knew he was a remarkable man of exceptional mind, I didn’t realize his greatness.”56 Also in the throng of students was again, Erik Routley, who was preparing for ministry at the Congregational theological college, Mansfield. He remembered: I think the next time he preached was in June, 1941, and the sermon was entitled “Weight of Glory.” This time it was a summer evening. Lighting was no problem. But the place was packed solid long before the service began. The last hymn was “Bright the Vision that Delighted.” The sermon took three-quarters of an hour to deliver. Just to read it now is to be captivated by its uncanny combination of sheer beauty and severe doctrine. Here, you will feel when reading, and you felt it ten times more when listening, was a man who had been laid hold of by Christ and enjoyed it. Lewis had a superbly unaffected delivery: a deep voice which went well with his cheerful and bucolic appearance (all pictures of him that I know are good ones). It was a voice that really did vindicate the saying that the medium is the message. No rhetorical tricks: he read every word. Yet the way he used words as precision tools, the effortless rhythm of the sentences, the scholarship made friendly, the sternness made beautiful— these things all made it impossible for the listener to notice the passing of time.

In this sermon there was a stunning blend of the three skills that made Lewis such an able Christian communicator. It was a precursor to all his later work. The romantic strains in his Chronicles of Narnia, the reasoned argument of Mere Christianity, and his relational concern that would later be evidenced in his letters, were to coalesce and whistle through the pages of the sermon he preached that evening. Here on display was the rational defender of the faith, an imaginative and romantic streak, and the emotional burden for his fellow human beings, which he felt especially strongly during wartime and which compelled him to speak. Text Lewis began the sermon with his “turning the tables” rhetorical trick. He knew his audience saw Christianity negatively rather than positively. Hence “self-denial” rather than “love” was posited as the highest Christian virtue. After putting self-denial in its proper subordinate place, Lewis made an astounding claim: It would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to keep on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.57

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One can almost imagine the Oxford undergraduates wondering where he was going with this line. He continued by describing Christian reward and desire by the analogy of a general and a schoolboy. He talked of a “transtemporal, tranfinite good” as our “real destiny,” a “desire for our own far-off country” that we call “Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.” He claims we try to label this desire “beauty” and attacks “any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind” that elusive and eternal desire that he labels Sehnsucht or better yet, “surprised by joy.”58 Peter Kreeft writes, “There are three places in C. S. Lewis’s work where the argument from desire is stated at length, though Sehnsucht itself seeps out from many pages in Lewis, most perfectly in “The Weight of Glory.”59 Kreeft has cleverly labeled the romantic rhetorical device that Lewis used to introduce his sermon as the “argument from desire.” The argument has a history running from St. Augustine to Blaise, from Pascal to Lewis, and on to Jacques Derrida.60 A “proof ” that focuses on desire rather than design is an effective theological and rhetorical move. Lewis the theorist claimed that “[rhetoric] works to produce in our minds some practical resolve” and “it does so by calling the passions to the aid of reason.”61 In so doing he hearkens back to Aristotle’s concept of pathos. The result is that he has unleashed a romantic longing that needs some sort of object. Lewis concludes the first major section of the sermon with a claim, “We remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness can satisfy.”62 In the middle of the sermon Lewis makes his case. He summed up the biblical answer in five points: “It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have ‘glory’; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe.”63 After a discussion of symbols, he turned to his explication of the notion of “glory,” which can mean being noticed, not being pitied by God, and “glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity.”64 He then brings the longing of the first part of his sermon to fulfillment: “Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe . . . the healing of that old ache” is realized in the God who was in Christ. Lewis states that it is not reason but rather revelation that ultimately leads one to God. He put it in a more poetic way than would a more prosaic preacher: “But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.”65 On a deeper level, Lewis was recognized as an authority able to speak for God, yet he chose not to highlight his own status but rather developed an ethos based on the pathos of desire and the logos of its Scriptural fulfillment. He gently reminded his listeners, “Meanwhile, the cross comes before the crown

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and tomorrow is Monday morning.”66 His extended discussion of glory ended with the corrective: It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it . . .67

He goes on to warn that in this society of people on the way to becoming a glorious or horrendous eternal being, “we are . . . helping each other to one of these destinations.”68 In what is one of the most quoted passages in the sermon if not in all his writing, he preached: The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it . . . It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.69

Lewis had a very transcendent ethical urge. Culture, society, and other constructions of modernity were less important to Lewis than character and ultimate destination. As Wesley Kort reminds us, Lewis stated his basis for his choice between culture and character clearly in a famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory.” Culture, even in the form of its most magnificent monuments . . . is of secondary importance when compared to the nature and destiny of persons.70 Lewis ends with the famous claim that there are “no ordinary people,” no “mere mortals”: Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.71

Homiletical historian David Larsen speaks for all who have studied the sermon: “The sermon is biblical, theologically sound and aptly and personally applied.”72 Theologian J. I. Packer describes Lewis this way: “he was a Christian communicator without peer on three themes; the reasonableness of and humanity

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of the Christian faith; the moral demands of discipleship; and heaven as home, the place of all value and contentment.”73 All three of the themes: reason, moral demand, and heaven as home are present in this sermon, in perhaps their most poignant and profound expression. Reception Alan Jacobs judges that “The Weight of Glory” is Lewis’s “greatest sermon.”74 Peter Kreeft goes even further when he claims that “The Weight of Glory” is “the best sermon I have ever read.”75 Walter Hooper writes, “ ‘The Weight of Glory’ is so magnificent that not only do I dare to consider it worthy a place with some of the Church Fathers, but I fear I should be hanged by Lewis’s admirers if it were not given primacy of place.”76 The sermon and the essay it became provide the best single example of how Lewis blended his rational, romantic, and relational case for Christ. Passages from this sermon have been included in other people’s sermons ever since. Most of us in the preaching profession read this, compare it to our efforts, and realize, to borrow from Lewis, “We are far too easily pleased.” Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, would take up the theme and demonstrate how crucial the search for joy or longing was to all that Lewis was and wrote. Yet this sermon summed up the ache and beauty of life as well as it could be said. At the graveside funeral of theatrical genius Kenneth Tynan, a former student of Lewis, words from this sermon were read by his daughter. Alan Jacobs uses the same words to close his biography of Lewis: The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited.77

Religion . . . , March 29, 1942 Context Lewis was invited to preach at the Evensong service at the Quarry Church by its vicar, T. E. Bleiben. This was the first of four Lenten services that he was to preach to his home congregation. A notation in the Register of Services states that it was a “National Day of Prayer.” This is the first time that Lewis is recorded as preaching at the Quarry Church. The register is signed by Lewis

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and he, in almost illegible penmanship in a tiny space, wrote the title of the sermon as “Religion . . .” There must have been great excitement that evening. Fred Paxford, caretaker of the Kilns and possible model for the character of Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, remembered: “When he preached at Quarry Church, it was always packed. He had a full clear voice which could be heard all over the church; and he nearly always brought a bit of humor into the sermon; and people seemed to like this.”78 Besides the intrinsic value Lewis brought to his home congregation, the extrinsic factors, such as his reputation as the author of The Screwtape Letters, published a mere month before,79 Out of the Silent Planet, and most of all the as man in the midst of the broadcast talks that captivated the nation, must have made the atmosphere electric. Text There are not too many extant essays with “religion” in the title. “Religion: Reality or Substitute?” is a possible candidate. There is no way Lewis could have fit that title into the allotted slot in the service book. Perhaps he used a different—and shorter title—out of necessity. This essay reads like a sermon, and was later expanded, as was “Transposition” and also “Miracles.” It has the hallmarks of a sermon on that has been transformed into an essay. The key concept, that experience can fool us into thinking the spiritual is the substitute, rather than the reality, has some vivid illustrations. He used the wartime substitution of margarine for butter and his childhood preference for a gramophone rather than a real orchestra. He used an example from Milton, which is interesting, since Lewis was turning the University College of North Wales Mathews Lectures into the book A Preface to Paradise Lost within the time period of the mystery sermon. Until more evidence is unearthed, “Religion: Reality or Substitute” is the most likely full title. Miracles, September 27, 1942 Context St. Jude’s-on-the- Hill sits in the center of Hampstead Garden Suburb, an imposing church designed by the great architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. For their 1942 third series of “Voice of the Laity,” the committee invited John G. Winant, the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, who turned them down for health reasons. Undeterred, they asked Hugh Lyon, the headmaster of Rugby, C. S. Lewis, who was to speak on September 27, and E. Leitberger from the Polish Embassy. Friedrich Hertz, a refugee economist

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substituted for the American ambassador, and the whole series culminated with the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, on October 18, 1942. The talks were given during the Evensong conducted by the Vicar, W. H. Maxwell Ronnie. The parish magazine introduced Lewis as: One of the most brilliant and provocative lay voices in the Church today. His recent book, The Problem of Pain, is still a best-seller and was one of the most widely-discussed books of recent years. The Spectator described it as “a really remarkable book.” Since then he has written The Screwtape Letters, which has gone through many editions . . . Mr. Lewis broadcasts frequently and has been a guest of the Brains Trust. His subject of “Miracles” offers opportunities for an unusually notable address.80

Lewis came to the service after his stop at BBC Broadcasting House where he gave his afternoon live broadcast, “Social Morality.” The service was crowded and the largest offering of the series, save for the Archbishop’s visit, was taken. Text The sermon started with one of his most effective audience-captivating introductions: “I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost.” He followed that up with a reversal of a truism, “Seeing is not believing. This is the first thing we must get clear in talking about miracles.”81 He then used reasoning and more biblical citations than in any of his other sermons, to make the case that “experience by itself proves nothing.” He posited that there are two conditions necessary; belief in the normal stability of nature and that there is some reality beyond nature. He found that most moderns dislike the idea of the miraculous and they confuse “the laws of nature and the laws of thought.” He turned to George Macdonald and to Athanasius to make the case that miracles “do small and quick what we have already seen in the large letters of God’s universal activity.”82 He labeled that the first class of miracle and went on to a second class of miracles that “foretell what God has not yet done, but will do, universally.”83 At this juncture, he admitted, “My time is nearly up and I must be very brief with the second class of people . . . those who mistake the laws of nature for the laws of thought.”84 He did not develop the argument fully but showed how both nature and thought seek to explain through use of sign and symbol to recall us back to reality. He ended on a sacramental note, declaring: “Common bread, miraculous bread, sacramental bread—these are distinct but not separated. Divine reality is like a fugue. All his acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one

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another.”85 “This vast symphonic splendour” reminded him of Julian or Norwich’s vision of Christ holding a small hazelnut. His last sentence made the most of this enigma: “And it seemed to her so small and weak that she wondered how it could hold together at all.”86 Likewise, Lewis tried to hold difficult theological and philosophical abstractions together in this sermon. Reception A letter written by an unbelieving listener gave Lewis some valuable feedback: “I knew beforehand that I should be much moved by your address tonight, and I knew from experience that I should sit entranced, but I never dreamed that I should approach so remotely near to believing in the subject of your talk.” She went on to criticize that the sermon was dependent on “the tacit agreement of the main structure of the Christian faith” and asked. if his “arguments could in any way apply or be of value if they did not assume Christianity.” She decided that they were of “true value to those who already believe.”87 Rosamund Rieu’s letter is invaluable on many fronts. As earlier noted, it helped establish when and where the sermon was preached. It demonstrates the sway Lewis had over the audience. And it raises the thorny issue of whether Lewis was an apologist for the unbeliever or simply an intellectual exhibit that believers could hold up as proof that smart people can believe in God. Lewis responded to the letter with a clarity that wasn’t always present in the sermon itself: Dear Miss Rieu, Speaking in a Church, I assumed: 1. Belief in the divinity of Jesus. 2. Belief in the general historicity of the New Testament and hence, 3. That if any miracles could be true, these ones would be. My argument only attempted to prove that the existence of supernatural was certain and its irruption into the Natural Order not improbable.88

The sermon, along with an adapted article, demonstrates that Lewis was pondering the subject of miracles. Biographers Hooper and Green make a good case that Dorothy L. Sayers provoked him into writing a full-length book on the subject. In a letter to Lewis of May 13, 1943, she complained that “there are not any up-to-date books on miracles.”89 He replied to her on May 17 to say he was writing a book and included a copy of the St. Jude’s sermon.90 Lewis’s sermon serves as a pr´ecis of his booklength treatment of the subject of miracles. It is hard to establish an exact source for the book or a trail of

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influence, but it is clear that Lewis used this sermon as a trial rhetorical run as he examined the nature of miracles and their defense before a skeptical world. Forgiveness, April 1, 1943 Context On April 1, 1943, Lewis preached his second annual Lenten Evensong sermon. The “Register of Services” noted that it was the fourth Sunday in Lent, and included Lewis’s signature and the title, “Forgiveness.” Text Walter Hooper writes in the “Preface” to Fern-Seed and Elephants: “[the] manuscript of “On Forgiveness” came to light while this book was in preparation. The essay was written in 1947 and has never been published anywhere before.”91 One possibility is that it was actually written in 1942 and it was the sermon Lewis preached at the Quarry Church in 1942. The other possibility is that the sermon preached on forgiveness was an early draft of the broadcast talk titled “Forgiveness,” which Lewis gave on October 18, 1942, which later became chapter seven in Book III of Mere Christianity. In either case, we have a key example how Lewis used preaching to work out ideas that would later appear in print. We have a sermon before it was transformed into something else. In his preface to Transposition, Lewis disingenuously claimed: “All were composed in response to personal requests and for a particular audience, without thought of subsequent publication.” Even if he didn’t realize it, he was working out key ideas that would later find fuller and more permanent expression. Lewis continued in the preface, “As a result, in one or two places they seem to repeat, though they really anticipated, sentences of mine which have subsequently appeared in print.”92 Lewis builds the sermon around a phrase in the Apostles’ Creed and implicitly on the words Jesus used in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:12. Lewis claimed that “we often make a mistake both about God’s forgiveness of our sins and about the forgiveness we are told to offer to other people’s sins.”93 We have a mistaken concept of God’s forgiveness that we want God “not to forgive” but “to excuse.”94 He found that most people are too satisfied with excuses. The remedy to this misconception is to first realize that God knows all the excuses and then to “really and truly believe in the forgiveness of sins,” from God’s perspective rather than ours.95 Lewis then turns to the question of forgiving other people. He again reminded his listeners that forgiving is not excusing. He contrasted the willingness to believe one’s own excuses and the unwillingness to believe the excuses

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of others by beginning his conclusion with a poignant observation: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard.” He claimed it was “not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life,” and here he mentioned “the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife.” He then closed: “ ‘Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.”96 Reception There is not enough evidence to trace the sources and influence of this sermon. But his published works and private letters demonstrate his preoccupation with helping people who too facilely say “forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”97 Unknown Sermon at Mansfield College, February 1944 Lewis’s reputation as a preacher led “Peterborough” in The Daily Telegraph of February 26, 1944, to call him “Modern Oxford’s Newman”: Ascetic Mr. C. S. Lewis, Magdalen’s English Literature tutor and author of The Screwtape Letters, is becoming ever more of a power in Oxford. Though a layman, he often occupies one or other of the pulpits in the University. An elderly Oxford don remarked to me the other day that there had been no preacher with Mr. Lewis’s influence since Newman. He more than fills the University church of St. Mary’s. Preaching on a recent Sunday in Mansfield College, to a congregation in which there were many senior members of the University, including the Warden of All Souls, he made a deep impression.98

The fact that the Anglican layperson Lewis attracted so many of the Oxford worthies to a Congregational college upset some Anglican chaplains who resented the reduced attendance at their own services. They were not the only ones upset. J. R. R. Tolkien complained about the column in a letter to his son Christopher, dated March 1, 1944: Lewis is as energetic and jolly as ever, but getting too much publicity for his or any of our tastes. “Peterborough,” usually fairly reasonable, did him the doubtful honour of a peculiarly misrepresentative and asinine paragraph in the Daily Telegraph of Tuesday last. It began “Ascetic Mr. Lewis”—! I ask you! He put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning, and said he was “going short for Lent.”99

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It seems that Lewis cut down on ale and added preaching to his Lenten discipline. Most of his sermons were preached during Lent. This may be a coincidence, although it adds more proof to Tolkien’s penitential preaching theory discussed earlier in this essay. Transposition, May 28, 1944 Context Nathaniel Micklem, the principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, wrote in his biography, “I can think of four preachers who in their day could be relied upon to ‘fill the chapel’; Russell Maltby, T. R. Glover, C. S. Lewis, and George Macleod.”100 Micklem invited Lewis back for a second sermon, this time on the Feast of Pentecost, May 28, 1944. This sermon, called “Transposition,” is important as the explication of his view of communication. It is also an important sermon because it was the one that Lewis almost didn’t finish. The Daily Telegraph of June 2, 1944, reported in an article titled, “Modern Oxford’s Newman” that “in the middle of the sermon Mr. Lewis, under stress of emotion, stopped, saying ‘I’m sorry,’ and left the pulpit.” After assistance from Nathaniel Micklem and a hymn, he was able to conclude the sermon “on a deeply moving note.”101 Text Lewis preaching on Pentecost introduced his sermon with a discussion of speaking in tongues. He used the story of Pentecost to frame the central question of apologetic, “Our problem is that the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual.”102 How does the preacher convey God’s glory and message to the natural world that cannot comprehend the supernatural? The “reasoning from below” model didn’t work for Lewis. What one person might think as emotion, another might think as a chemical reaction to something she ate. He stressed “revelation from above.” That revelation needs to be translated, or to borrow a term from music, “transposed.” There is no one-to-one correspondence between the supernatural and the natural. Lewis continued, “We are all quite familiar with this kind of transposition or adaptation from a richer to a poorer medium. The most familiar example of all is the art of drawing. The problem here is to represent a three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper.”103 He proceeded to develop this “Transposition from above” to dispel notions of “mere natural” answers to spiritual questions: “At the worst, we know enough of the spiritual to know that we have fallen short of it.”104

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At that moment he said, “I’m sorry,” and he disappeared from the pulpit. After a brief respite, he regained his composure and finished the sermon. He concluded with four points: 1. Transposition is not development. 2. Transposition helps with the doctrine of the incarnation. 3. Don’t see all facts and miss the meaning—a “nothing but” fallacy. 4. Transposition throws new light on the resurrection.

Reception Lewis seems to not have been satisfied with this sermon as it was when he delivered it. He apparently did nothing with it for several years. Walter Hooper writes: My guess is that at sometime, but not necessarily in 1944, he may have felt that he had not succeeded as well as he might have with “Transposition.” Though he was quite ill during the spring of 1961 when Jock Gibb, his publisher at Geoffrey Bles, was pressing him to edit a volume of his essays, something wonderful happened. With a simplicity that is perhaps an instance of Heaven coming to its own rescue, Lewis was shown what glories are involved by the corruptible putting on the incorruptible, and there came from his pen an additional portion that raises that sermon to an eminence all its own. This new portion begins on p. 68 with the paragraph “I believe that this doctrine of Transposition provides . . .” and concludes on p. 69 with the paragraph ending, “They are too transitory, too phantasmal.” This extended version of the sermon first appeared in Lewis’s They Asked for a Paper (London, 1962).105

When a fan of Lewis’s named Rhonda Bodle wrote with a question about the incarnation, Lewis sent her a copy of the recently published book Transposition and recommended the essay based on the sermon.106 Miserable Offenders, March 31, 1946 and April 7, 1946 Context This sermon was preached first at the Quarry Church and on the next Sunday the same sermon was preached at St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton. St. Matthews invited “five distinguished laymen who are members of the Church of England” to preach on Sunday nights in April and May 1946. Lewis inaugurated the series, followed by his former student, the poet John Betjeman, two military men, and Sir Eric Maclagan of the Victoria and Albert Museum.107 The sermons continued Lewis’s string of Lenten preaching.

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Text Warnie Lewis served as a critic when he wrote in his diary on Sunday March 31, 1946: He began by speaking of the doubts which some of us feel about the wording of the Book of Common Prayer: e.g. the confession before Communion, when we say of our sins, “The burden of them is intolerable.” Not having this feeling, I always leave this sentence out; but J’s theory is that the matter of feeling does not arise—the sense of the phrase is that, whether we are aware of it emotionally or not, we are carrying a load of sin which unless we get rid of it, will ultimately break us as an excessive load will break a bridge: and in this sense our sin is intolerable.108

Lewis once again used his old turning-the-table trick: Does Christianity encourage morbid introspection? The alternative is much more morbid. Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others. It is healthier to think of one’s own . . . A serious attempt to repent and really to know one’s own sin is in the long run a lightening and relieving process.109

The final sentence sums up the sermon: “It is the difference between the pain of the tooth about which you should go to the dentist and the simple straightforward pain which you know is going to get less and less every moment when you have had the tooth out.”110 Untitled March 9, 1947 This would be Lewis’s last Lenten Evensong service at the Quarry Church. The Register of Service notes that it was the Third Sunday in Lent.111 There is no further information on the title of the sermon. LESS PREACHING, MORE WRITING There was, as far as the existing records indicate, an almost decade long hiatus in Lewis’s preaching. The most logical explanation is that the war was over and he felt his obligations to speak were over. There was also the matter of his commitment to finish a raft of other writing projects. He began to commute from Oxford to his new professorial chair at Cambridge University in 1954. Then there were family demands of an aging Mrs. Moore, whom he had been taking care of since he made a World War I promise to her son to do so should her son not live through the war, his alcoholic brother Warnie, and of course Joy Davidman Gresham and her two sons.

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Douglas Gresham remembers that Lewis “preached every now and then by invitation” so there may be more sermons yet to be discovered. However, he highlights several reasons why Lewis cut back on his preaching: “First, he was very busy from 1954 to 1960 looking after my mother and spending what little time he had with her in the care and enjoyment of their short marriage, and secondly, Jack would not speak unless he had something to say.”112 It seems that he had more and more to write and less and less to preach. Whatever the reason, his preaching career was over, except for a brief and brilliant reprise. When Lewis left Oxford to take up his chair at Cambridge, he became a fellow at Magdalene College. The chaplain of the college invited him to preach at Evensong, on January 29, 1956. The tiny chapel was overflowing with over a hundred people who came to hear what turned out to be Lewis’s last sermon, “Slip of the Tongue.” The introduction provides one of the secrets of his preaching success: “When a layman has to preach a sermon I think he is most likely to be useful, or even interesting, if he starts exactly from where he is himself; not so much presuming to instruct as comparing notes.”113 Rather than using a Scriptural text, Lewis admitted that he slipped up in the collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity and prayed, “so to pass through things eternal that I finally lost not the things temporal.”114 He admitted that his temptation is to “guard the things temporal,” not to “get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline that connects me with my things temporal.”115 He used amusing stories and Trollope’s Archdeacon to make his case against shallow spirituality. He continued to develop the shore metaphor and claimed, “that the lifeline is really a death-line but ‘our real protection is to be found elsewhere . . . Swimming lessons are better than a lifeline to shore.’ ”116 He continued in elegant aphorism: “He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know no promise that he will accept deliberate compromise. For he has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but himself.”117 Lewis ended the sermon with the emphasis on transformation: “What God does for us, he does in us.” He encouraged his listeners to prayer, “Grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet.”118 As Lewis encouraged his listeners to pray each morning, I cannot think of a better way to close than to encourage meditation upon Lewis’s “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” from whose opening and closing lines one glimpses the humility and perspicacity of Lewis, reflecting on his true vocation and the perils therein: From all my lame defeats and oh! Much more .... Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me. ....

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Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye, Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.119

NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought,” Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 260. 2. Horton Davies, Varieties of English Preaching 1900–1960 (London: SCM Press, 1963), 187. 3. C. S. Lewis, “The Christian in Danger,” in Famous English Sermons, ed. Ashley Sampson (London: Thomas Nelson, 1940). 4. Ralph G. Turnbull, A History of Preaching, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1974), 466–467. 5. James Como, Branches to Heaven (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1998), 148. 6. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), 6. The talk that formed the basis for the first chapter of the book was given on August 6, 1941. See Justin Phillips, C. S. Lewis at the BBC (London: HarperCollins, 2002) for a brilliant history of Lewis’s radio speaking. 7. Horton Davies, Varieties of English Preaching 1900–1960 (London: SCM Press, 1963), 186. 8. Barfield first described Lewis this way in his Preface to The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer, ed. Bruce Edwards (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988). 9. Charles Gilmore, “To the RAF,” in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, ed. James Como (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 189. 10. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 5. This same preface is included in all further editions of what in America was published as Weight of Glory. 11. Erik Routley, “Striking Effect,” in In Search of C. S. Lewis, ed. Stephen Schofield (South Plainfield, NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1983), 99. 12. Phone conversation with Walter Hooper, June 12, 2006. 13. Unpublished letter cited in A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Collins, 1990), 179. 14. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 75. 15. C. S. Lewis, “Letter XVI,” The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), 82. 16. Ibid., 82–83. 17. November 19, 1939 and September 18, 1939 letters in C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters Vol. II, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 290, 277. 18. C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 341.

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19. James Como, Branches to Heaven (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1998), 147. 20. Paul Sangster, Doctor Sangster (London: Epworth, 1960), 303. Dr. Sangster outlines his father’s participation. W. E. Sangster was joined by evangelist Gypsie Smith and a host of other prominent Christians. See the program to Westminster 1945: The Westminster Central Hall Campaign Programme and Hymns. 21. C. S. Lewis, “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought,” Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 260. 22. Horton Davies, Varieties of English Preaching 1900–1960 (London: SCM Press, 1963), 178. 23. Jolyon P. Mitchell, Visually Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching (Edinburgh, Scotland: T and T Clark, 1999), 6–7. 24. Bryan C. Hollon, “Is the Epistle to Diognetus an Apology? A Rhetorical Analysis.” Journal of Communication and Religion 29 (March 2006): 142. 25. Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argument (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 50. 26. Personal e-mail from Douglas Gresham on June 19, 2006. 27. Fred W. Paxford, “He Should Have Been a Parson,” in We Remember C. S. Lewis, ed. Douglas Graham (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2001), 127. 28. Warren H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie L. Mead (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1982), 189. 29. The Register of Services (from April 23,1944 to March 26, 1947) contains Lewis’s signature as the preacher at the 6 p.m. Evening Prayer service at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry. PAR127/1/R7 10 at Oxfordshire County Archives. 30. The history of the published sermon, except for the fact that it was first preached at the Quarry Church, is found in Lesley Walmsey’s Introduction to the sermon in C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Stories (London: HarperColllins, 2000), 461. 31. C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis (London: Collins, 1966), 490. 32. This sermon became an essay eventually published in World Dominion, vol. XIX (September–October 1943), and expanded and published in Christian Reflections (London: Bles, 1967), 37–43. 33. The Oxfordshire County archives contain the service books before and after. The archives have term cards listing preachers starting in 1947 as well as the sermon texts from 1947 to 1997. Alas, the Lewis sermons were preached before that. 34. The Register of Services from 1 November 1940-19 April 1944,” PAR 127/1/R7/9 contains Lewis’s signature and the Title “Religion & ——— ,” which looks like the word “Pleasure.” There is no essay by that title but Walter Hooper told me that it is a phrase Lewis uses in a letter (Phone conversation, June 2, 2006). The later sermon, without a title, is found in Register of Services from 23 April 1944–26 March 1949.” PAR/127/1/R7/10

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35. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 5. 36. Not December 1939 as claimed by Lesley Walmsley in her introduction to “Learning in Wartime” in C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 579. 37. Walter Hooper interviewed Milford and shares the results in his “Introduction,” C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1980), xxi. 38. Erik Routley, “A Prophet,” in C. S. Lewis and the Breakfast Table, ed. James T. Como. (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 34, 33–37. 39. C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters: Brooks, Broadcast and War 1931– 1949, vol. 2, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), 280. 40. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 45. 41. Ibid. 42. His chapter entitled “Distinguished Lay Preaching: B. L. Manning and C. S. Lewis,” in Horton Davies, Varieties of English Preaching 1900–1960 (London: SCM Press, 1963) is stunning. The quote is from page 172. 43. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays, 45; Horton Davies, Varieties of English Preaching, 172. 44. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays, 46. 45. Ibid., 46–47. 46. Ibid., 50. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 54. 49. Ashley Sampson, ed., Famous English Sermons (London: Thomas Nelson, 1940), xvi. 50. Robert Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 286. 51. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2004, 353. 52. For example, the first line “A university, as you all know, is a society . . .” becomes “A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.” 53. James Como, Branches to Heaven (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1998), 148. Como claims that “Lewis delivered only a handful of sermons, but they made history in their day.” 54. Walter Hooper, “Introduction,” in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1980), xxi. 55. “God blind me (or good heavens), Jack gave them both barrels” is the way an English colleague translated the sentence for me. The remark is recorded in Robert Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 244. 56. Rosamund Cowen, “With Women at College,” in In Search of C. S. Lewis, ed. Stephen Schofield (South Plainfield, NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1983), 63.

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57. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 21. 58. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), is the best source for an expansion of this sense of longing. 59. Peter Kreeft, “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire,” in G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy, ed. M. H. Macdonald and A. A. Tade (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 252. 60. Frank Burch Brown makes the case for Derrida as a “poetic philosopher” who is an “unlikely” witness to this apologetical move in Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 90ff. 61. C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 53. 62. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 25. 63. Ibid., 26. 64. Ibid., 30. 65. Ibid., 31. 66. Ibid., 32. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Wesley A. Cort. C. S. Lewis: Then and Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100. 71. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 33. 72. David L. Larsen, The Company of the Preachers (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1998), 762. 73. J. I. Packer, “What Lewis Was and Wasn’t,” in We Remember C. S. Lewis, ed. Douglas Graham (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2001), 8. 74. Alan Jacobs, The Narnian (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 231. 75. Peter Kreeft, “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire,” in G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy, ed. M. H. Macdonald and A. A. Tade (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 252. 76. Walter Hooper, “Introduction,” in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1980), xxi. 77. Alan Jacobs, The Narnian (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 314. 78. Fred W. Paxford, “Observations of a Gardener,” in We Remember C. S. Lewis, ed. David Graham (Nashville, TN: Broadman, and Holman, 2001), 127. 79. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 803. It was published on February 9, 1942.

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80. Anonymous, “Voice of the Laity, Third Series,” St. Jude’s Gazette 72 (September, 1942): 4. 81. C. S. Lewis, “Miracles,” Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 107. 82. Ibid., 113. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 115 85. Ibid., 117. 86. Ibid. 87. September 27, 1942, letter to Lewis from Rosamund Rieu, “With Women at College,” in In Search of C. S. Lewis, ed. Stephen Schofield (South Plainfield, NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1983), 64. 88. Lewis responded to Rosamund Rieu, who was at St. Hilda’s and one of his first women students on September 28, 1942. It is found in Scofield’s In Search of C. S. Lewis, 66. 89. Robert Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 285. 90. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. II, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2004, 573. 91. C. S. Lewis, Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity (London: William Collins, 1975), 8. 92. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 5. 93. C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 184. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 185. 96. Ibid., 186. 97. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), 91. 98. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 37–38. 99. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 68. 100. Nathaniel Micklem, The Box and the Puppets (1883–1953) (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1957), 122. 101. Walter Hooper, “Introduction,” in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1980), xxii. 102. C. S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Essays (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 10. 103. Ibid., 14. 104. Ibid., 17. 105. Walter Hooper, “Introduction,” in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1980), xxii–xxiii.

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106. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 926. 107. The sermons were collected in C. S. Lewis, John Betjemen, Oliver Leese, R. J. R. Scott, and Eric Maclagan, Five Sermons by Laymen (Northampton, Northamptonshire: St. Matthews, 1946). 108. Warren H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie L. Mead. (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1982), 188. 109. C. S. Lewis, “Miserable Offenders,” Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 464–465. 110. Ibid., 465. 111. PAR 127/1/R7/10 Register of Services April 23, 1944–March 26, 1949. 112. Personal e-mail from Douglas Gresham on June 19, 2006. 113. C. S. Lewis, “Slip of the Tongue,” Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 384. 114. Ibid., 384. 115. Ibid., 385. 116. Ibid., 386. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. 119. C. S. Lewis, Poems (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 129.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anonymous. “Voice of the Laity, Third Series.” St. Jude’s Gazette 72 (September, 1942): 4. Babbage, Stuart Barton. “To the Royal Air Force.” C. S. Lewis: Speaker and Teacher. Edited by Carolyn Keefe. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971, 85–102. Ceccareli, Leah. Shaping Science with Rhetoric. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Como, James. Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis. Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1998. Cort, Wesley A. C. S. Lewis: Then and Now. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Cowen, Rosamund. “With Women at College.” In Search of C. S. Lewis. Edited by Stephen Schofield. South Plainfield, NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1983, 61–66. Davies, Horton. Varieties of English Preaching 1900–1960. London: SCM Press, 1963. Gilmore, Charles. “To the RAF.” C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. Edited by James T. Como. New York: Macmillan, 1979, 186–191. Goffar, Janine. C. S. Lewis Index: Rumours form the Sculptor’s Shop. Carlisle, UK: Solway Press, 1997.

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Graham, D., ed. We Remember C. S. Lewis. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2001. Green, Robert Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Fully Revised and Expanded Edition. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Griffin, William. Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Hollon, Bryan C. “Is the Epistle to Diognetus an Apology? A Rhetorical Analysis.” Journal of Communication and Religion 29 (March 2006), 127–46. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. London: HarperCollins, 1996. ———, ed. “Introduction.” The Weight of Glory and Other Address: Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. San Francisco, CA:HarperSanFrancisco, 2005. Jenkins, Simon. England’s Thousand Best Churches. London: Penguin Press, 1999. Kreeft, Peter. “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire.” G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy. Edited by M. H. Macdonald and A. A. Tade. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989. Larson, David L. The Company of Preachers: A History of Biblical Preaching from the Old Testament to the Modern Era. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1998. Lewis, C. S. C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters: Brooks, Broadcast and War 1931–1949, vol. 2. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters: Family Letters 1905–1931, vol. 1. Edited by Walter Hooper, London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. “The Christian in Danger.” In Famous English Sermons. Edited by Ashley Sampson (London: Thomas Nelson, 1940), 368–382. ———. The Christian in Danger. London: SCM, 1939. ———. Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. London: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. Fern-Seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity. Edited by W. Hooper. London: William Collins, 1975. ———. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Edited by W. H. Lewis. London: Collins, 1966. ———. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. ———. “Miracles.” St. Jude’s Gazette 73 (October 1942): 4–7. ———. “None Other Gods: Culture in War Time.” Church of St. Mary the Virgin: Oxford, December 22, 1939. ———. Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press, 1942. ———. Poems. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964. ———. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. ———. Transposition and Other Essays. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. ———. Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971. ———. The Weight of Glory. London: SPCK, 1942. ———. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses: Revised and Expanded Edition. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1980.

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Lewis, Warren H. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie L. Mead. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1982. Micklem, Nathaniel. The Box and the Puppets (1883–1953). London: Geoffrey Bles, 1957. Mitchell, Jolyon P. Visually Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching. Edinburgh, Scotland: T and T Clark, 1999. Packer, J. I. “What Lewis Was and Wasn’t.” In We Remember C. S. Lewis. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2001, 8. Paxford, William W. “He Should Have Been a Parson.” In We Remember C. S. Lewis. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2001, 207. Perelman, Chaim and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argument. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. Pettegree, Andrew. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Phillips, Justin. C. S. Lewis at the BBC. Messages of Hope in the Darkness of War. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Rees, Tom. Westminster 1945: The Westminster Central Hall Campaign Programme and Hymns. London: Westminster Hall Campaign, 1945. “Register of Services Advent IV 1938-16 April 1944.” St. Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb. “Register of Services, 1 November 40–19 April 44.” Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. PAR 127/1/R7/9. Oxfordshire Record Office. “Register of Services 23 April 1944- 26 March 1949.” Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. PAR 127/1/R7/10. Oxfordshire Record Office. Routley, Erik. “A Prophet.” C. S. Lewis and the Breakfast Table. Edited by James T. Como. New York: Macmillan, 1979, 33–37. ———. “Striking Effect.” In Search of C. S. Lewis. Edited by S. Schofield, South Plainfield. NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1983, 97–102. Sangster, Paul. Doctor Sangster. London: The Epworth Press, 1962. Simpson, Ashley. “An Anglican Picture Gallery.” Church of England Newspaper (October 4) (1946): 7. ———, ed. Famous English Sermons. London: Thomas Nelson, 1940. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Turnbull, Ralph G. The History of Preaching, vol. 3. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1974. Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. London: Collins, 1990.

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5

The Abolition of Man: C. S. Lewis’s Philosophy of History Michael Travers

The Abolition of Man (1943) is the published version of the three Riddell Memorial Lectures sponsored by the University of Durham. C. S. Lewis (“Jack”) and his brother Warren (“Warnie”) traveled from Oxford to the university and cathedral town of Durham, arriving on February 24, 1943. Jack delivered the three lectures on the evenings of February 24, 25, and 26 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.1 Warnie records in his diary that the event was “a little oasis in the dreariness”2 of their lives at the time. It was the middle of World War II, food was rationed, and life was grim for everyone in Britain. Jack and Warnie loved the beautiful cathedral and university town of Durham and enjoyed the three-day respite immensely.3 The Riddell Memorial Lectures were founded in 1928 in memory of Sir John Walter Buchanan-Riddell. These lectures were established to address “a subject concerning the relation between religion and contemporary development of thought.”4 Lewis delivered the Fifteenth Series of these lectures, and Oxford University Press published the lectures immediately, as it did in a number of the other Riddell Memorial Lectures in the years surrounding Lewis’s lectures.5 A quick look at some of the titles shows the subjects addressed in the lectures at that time,6 with topics ranging from science to psychology, philosophy, politics, and history. Issues related to religion and culture marked the common ground for all of the Riddell Memorial

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Lectures. Lewis’s 1943 Riddell Memorial Lectures addressed the decline in modern times of belief in an objective natural law and a correspondence epistemology. CONTEXT IN C. S. LEWIS’S LIFE The stage of Lewis’s life when he published The Abolition of Man (1943) was a prolific time of writing and publication. The years from 1938 to 1947 embody the early stage in a two-decade period of writing in a wide range of genres extending from apologetics to adult fiction, children’s fantasy, theology and more. The early 1940s were also the war years when many Britons faced difficulties brought about by the war and were forced to consider the serious metaphysical and ethical questions raised by Nazi aggression. Beginning in 1938, Lewis published Out of the Silent Planet, the first in the Ransom trilogy or “science fiction” novels, and in 1940, The Problem of Pain, his first sustained attempt at apologetics. In August of 1941, he began the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio broadcasts, which he delivered live in four series lasting through 1944 and published in 1952 as Mere Christianity. These talks were immediately popular, so much so they must have hit a nerve much deeper than the war itself, for they addressed universal issues of the human condition. In 1941 the popular Socratic Club, an open weekly forum at Oxford University to discuss “the pros and cons of the Christian Religion,”7 was initiated with Lewis as its first president and a major debate participant. In 1942 Lewis published The Screwtape Letters, another immensely popular work, and A Preface to Paradise Lost in which he “rehabilitates” the misunderstood poet, John Milton, for the modern academy. Along with The Abolition of Man in 1943, Lewis published an essay that amounts to something of a summary of The Abolition of Man, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” and also Perelandra, the second in the Ransom Trilogy novels. In 1945, he published The Great Divorce, a theological fantasy on heaven and hell, and That Hideous Strength, the final Ransom novel in which he says he wrote a “tall story” about the “serious ‘point’” he made in The Abolition of Man.8 Finally, in 1947, Lewis published Miracles, the last of this series of works written during this period. These same years saw a sudden increase in his popularity (because of The Screwtape Letters and the BBC Radio Talks) and a sharp increase in his correspondence. It was in this context that Lewis published The Abolition of Man, a book that he later claimed was “almost my favourite among my books but in general has been almost totally ignored by the public.”9 Lewis was not alone in this assessment, for his literary executor Walter Hooper states that The Abolition of Man is “an all but indispensable introduction to the entire corpus of Lewisiana.”10

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A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE ABOLITION OF MAN The occasion for The Abolition of Man was the publication of two English textbooks that, inadvertently or otherwise, espoused a moral relativism that Lewis found untenable. To save the authors embarrassment, Lewis used fictional names for these books. The first book, which he calls “The Green Book” by “Gaius and Titius,” is in fact The Control of Language by Alex King and Martin Ketley, published in 1940.11 The second offending textbook, for which Lewis identifies only an “author” (“Orbilius”), is The Reading and Writing of English by E. G. Biaggini, published in 1936.12 It does not take long for the reader of The Abolition of Man to understand that Lewis is not simply admonishing English schoolmasters to correct a pedagogical error. He is, rather, writing to tackle nothing less than the hegemony of relativism in modern western culture. For Lewis, this subjectivism was most apparent and dangerous in epistemology and ethics. Consequently, The Abolition of Man is a book about ethics, with roots in history and metaphysics. It is a trenchant critique of modernity, specifically its subjectivism in morals and epistemology, its abuse of scientific thinking, and its belief in “unilinear progression,” which Lewis considered simply unrealistic.13 In C. S. Lewis in Context, Doris T. Myers states that Lewis knew that the ideas in The Control of Language, carried to their logical conclusions, “would lead to the destruction of everything that makes human beings truly human”14 —or, in other words, to the “abolition of man.” King and Ketley’s little schoolbook may have seemed harmless to many, but Lewis understood that its convictions were dehumanizing,15 and so worked to refute them in the Riddell Memorial Lectures and The Abolition of Man. The Abolition of Man has three chapters corresponding to the three lectures delivered at the University of Durham. In the first chapter, “Men without Chests,” Lewis identifies the problem in modern culture as a radical subjectivity that has undermined everything that makes us human. Throughout the history of the West until modern times, people have held that there is a universal moral law and that our understanding of reality is reliable because our knowledge corresponds to reality as it is—in short, a correspondence epistemology. Lewis cites Plato and Augustine, among others, as examples of this long-standing and nonsectarian understanding of “the way things are.” In Mere Christianity, Lewis calls the universal moral code “the law of human nature” or simply “natural law,” and in The Abolition of Man he calls it the “Tao.”16 While The Tao may seem amorphous and unnecessarily Asian to many readers, Lewis thought it was sufficient for his case.17 He defines The Tao as “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and

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the kind of things we are.”18 In the twentieth century, however, intellectuals turned away from the traditional view of values and knowledge to a subjectivist perspective, and for Lewis, this shift is lethal to fundamental humanity. What is the antidote to the subjectivism of modern culture? For Lewis, the antidote is for us to reassert the objectivity of traditional values and order our behavior accordingly. And as he concludes, “The head rules the belly through the chest”19 —that is, the intellect (the “head”) rules the appetites (the “belly”) through justly educated sentiments (the “chest”). Lewis’s point is that objective values based in natural law distinguish us from angels on the one hand and animals on the other. Reason aligns us with the angels, passion with the animals. A proper education in Lewis’s view trains right virtues in children and teaches them to behave according to the traditional moral code of western civilization. “Men without chests”? These are people whose loss of traditional values (the “chest”) renders them something other than what we have understood historically by the word “human.” In chapter two, “The Way,” Lewis defends traditional values in large measure by demonstrating the inconsistencies in the opposing subjectivist position. For example, Lewis argues against the idea that values are based on instincts and therefore relative. “Our instincts,” he writes, “are at war” and do not in themselves provide a moral imperative.20 How can they? Defining one instinct as “good” and another as “bad” requires an appeal to a third standard, which is neither one of the two instincts so called. It is to invoke the universal moral code.21 No logic can draw a value judgment from factual propositions.22 No matter how hard we try, we simply cannot step outside of the moral law. It alone provides the basis for all value judgments. Lewis’s unflinching commitment to universal, objective moral standards in face of the subjectivist drift in modern culture is his great contribution to ethical thinking in the modern world. He knew we can neither refute natural law nor raise a new system of value in its place. It is simply impossible to do so.23 Or, at least, it is impossible to do so, according to Lewis, and remain human. Chapter three, “The Abolition of Man,” looks to the future of humankind without traditional moral values, a “brave new world” where rulers do not believe in objective truth, reality, or values (such as “truth and mercy” and “beauty and happiness”),24 but rather follow their own subjective impulses. Part of Lewis’s concern in this chapter is that the rejection of natural law will result in the unprincipled rule of a few men over the billions,25 with these men subject only to their own “irrational impulses” as the only guide for their behavior.26 They will have rejected all objective morality in natural law and stepped outside the mainstream of western history to legislate their own preferences as a “new” morality. In The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, Michael D. Aeschliman captures both the

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idea and the tone of Lewis’s concern about this trend toward subjectivism. Aeschliman writes, “The triumph of personal desire over objective validity as a standard of behavior creates what is tantamount to a moral vacuum into which will rush disordered passions bloated in their abnormal freedom from any constraint.”27 Without an objective moral code, we put ourselves at risk. Humans are by nature ethical creatures and cannot live in moral nihilism for long. Aeschliman’s imagery of “disordered passions [that are] bloated . . .” expresses Lewis’s fears well, for passion is tyrannical. To state it more baldly, power cut off from moral rectitude inevitably leads to desire, not obligation, on the part of those who rule. And without the Tao, what is to stop the leaders who have the power at their disposal from using their citizens to satisfy their own desires? Machiavelli understood society and its rulers this way. One of the tools these “Conditioners,” as he calls these new leaders, will use is scientific knowledge and advances. Now, Lewis is not opposed to science and the many benefits it offers,28 but he is opposed to the abuse of science to gain raw power. He calls this abuse “scientism.” Lewis distinguishes between science and scientism by comparing the modern scientist with the magician of earlier ages. He states, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.29 The magicians of earlier times have been replaced by the conditioners of modern times, but both seek dominance over nature and humankind alike.30 A world ruled by such amoral conditioners and their lackey scientists is a world in which raw desire grasps raw power. It is a world in which we will have ‘abolished’ mankind. A fool’s bargain it would be, to sell the soul for tyranny and slavery.”31 Doris T. Myers understands the high stakes. She writes, “If the absolute standards of the Tao are . . . built into human nature, then any attempt to study or control human nature apart from these standards is dehumanizing.”32 Subjectivism in values, scientism, and the control of human nature—these are the objects of Lewis’s attack in The Abolition of Man. At bottom, they all deny reality, destroy all virtue and value in human life, lead us away from our essential humanity, and result in social tyranny and slavery. Lewis’s concerns, expressed in the context of Nazi aggression and the Soviet revolution, seem terribly prophetic of the postmodern culture of the early twenty-first century. HELP FROM HISTORY For Lewis, it was clear that, if we were to preserve our essential humanity in the face of subjectivism and scientism, we would have to do so from the

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grounds of objective truth and morality. To regain a proper understanding of objective truth and morality, Lewis knew that we must study history. Accordingly, The Abolition of Man develops an implicit philosophy of history as an important part of the context within which he sees the issues in modern culture. The remainder of this chapter will consider Lewis’s philosophy of history and what he thinks history has to offer us if we are to recover our abolished humanity. In the essay entitled “Historicism” published originally in 1950, Lewis lists six senses of history, in part to demonstrate how difficult it is to claim that we can understand history with any ultimate authority. The term history, Lewis says, may refer to (1) all of time—past, present, and future; (2) all of the events of the past; (3) as much of the past as we can discover from evidence; (4) the events of the past discovered by cutting-edge researchers; (5) the events made available to the general populace by great historians; and (6) the vague picture of the past the educated man has in his mind.33 Now it is obvious that we cannot make any serious claims to understand history in the first two senses; it is clear that we can never have a complete picture of history in the third sense; it is evident that only a few will know history in the fourth sense, while most people will think of the fifth sense when they think of history at all. Lewis considers the sixth sense in this essay, specifically when historians attempt to generalize about “meanings” of historical periods. When they do so, Lewis claims, they cease being historians and become historicists. “The mark of the Historicist,” Lewis writes, “is that he tries to get from historical premises conclusions which are more than historical; conclusions metaphysical or theological or (to coin a word) atheo-logical.”34 At best this is a flaw in logic, at worst sectarianism and even propaganda. Even apart from the problems historicist readings of history bring, Lewis expresses serious reservations about the possibility of developing a philosophy of history at all. Peter Kreeft states that Lewis “disbelieves in the philosophy of history.”35 In his inaugural address at Cambridge University on November 29, 1954, “De Descriptione Temporum,” Lewis announced he was a “desperate skeptic” about “everything that could be called ‘the philosophy of history.’”36 Contra Hegel, he doubted whether historians could identify the spirit or meaning of a given period of history with accuracy.37 It is true that we can know certain facts from the past, though we will never be certain that they are representative and complete. What troubled Lewis was the all-too-common attempt to interpret history in such a way as to assign a given period an essential meaning or identity. All such futile attempts he calls “historicism,” which he defines as “the belief that men can, by the use of their natural powers, discover an inner meaning in the historical process.”38 For Lewis, the historian can describe events of the past, albeit in an incomplete manner, but he cannot

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interpret events in such a way as to characterize the “meaning” of a period with any certainty. To try to do so would be to change from being a historian to becoming a historicist. The problem is that we live in “an untidy world,” which “as Lewis experiences it,” Gilbert Meilaender states, “resists complete systematization.”39 It is simply impossible to speak with any authority of what the character of an age might have been. Historicist renderings are a non sequitur in Lewis’s view, a process of drawing metaphysical or theological (or even “atheo-logical,” to use Lewis’s coined term) conclusions from historical premises, and are therefore illogical and specious.40 THE GREAT TRADITION IN WESTERN HISTORY His “desperate skepticism” about the philosophy of history notwithstanding, however, Lewis stands squarely within the mainstream of classical western thinking that there is a “great tradition” in history. This tradition rests on the conviction that reason used as it was intended leads us to God. It is the “common sense” heritage of people throughout the ages, or in Michael D. Aeschliman’s words, “the great central philosophical/metaphysical tradition of the West in which Lewis enlisted his own mind and pen.”41 Aeschliman identifies the great thinkers in this central western tradition as Plato, Aristotle, St. John, Augustine, Aquinas, Richard Hooker, Samuel Johnson, and G. K. Chesterton—all men who shared a common morality at bottom, despite whatever differences they may have had.42 In “Is Progress Possible?” Lewis adds that the “key-conceptions” of this tradition are “natural law, the value of the individual, [and] the rights of man.”43 These virtues fall in the center of the tradition of “natural law,” which Lewis identifies in The Abolition of Man,44 and “The Law of Human Nature” in Mere Christianity. John Warwick Montgomery understood rightly that for Lewis “the main function of literary as of historical study is to make contact with that great tradition which for the first time since ancient classical times has been broken” in modern times.45 The Abolition of Man attempts to reconnect its readers with this great tradition in western history—the tradition of objective and universal moral standards and the acceptance of an objective reality and the correspondence epistemology that accompanies it. The cornerstone of Lewis’s analysis of western history in The Abolition of Man is the tradition of natural law, or the Tao. For Lewis, the nature of man as created by God provides the foundation of this traditional morality; it is not grounded in any specifically Christian or New Testament understanding of morality but is rather an innate moral code shared by everyone, everywhere.46 In The Abolition of Man Lewis states that the Tao “is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is

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the Way, the Road.”47 While we might disagree with the idea that moral law precedes the existence of God [that is, God qua Creator], the important point in Lewis’s statement is that natural law is a universal moral code. It is, in Meilaender’s words, constituted by “the primeval moral platitudes,” which all humans in all cultures share48 and, in John G. West’s words, the “ethical first principles shared by all human beings.”49 Natural law is archetypal. It is universal and objective, and it regulates and judges all actions of all people everywhere—even those who deny it. This universal natural law does not contradict the Christian view of ethics, but rather supports it. The classical New Testament expression of natural law is found early in the book of Romans, quoted here in the translation of the Bible which Lewis used, the King James or Authorized Version. Paul writes, “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.”50 Lewis agrees with Paul’s argument that all people everywhere have a moral conscience, and that conscience is grounded in an objective moral law. In “Men without Chests” Lewis declares that there is an objective reality in which objects inherently demand certain responses from human beings based on a correspondence epistemology.51 To affirm that such virtues as “truth and mercy and beauty and happiness”52 are good is simply to admit what is inherently true with or without our affirmation. What is more, it is to do so from within the tradition of natural law—the only position from which we can understand reality and truth.53 Of the absolute necessity of living, thinking, and behaving from within the Tao, Meilaender writes, “If the Tao is the reality within which human life must be lived, it is destructive of one’s humanity to claim autonomy over against its maxims. It is, in fact, selfdestructive.”54 This is the foundational teaching and burden of The Abolition of Man. Humans are by nature ethical creatures, and their ethics are objective and universal in essentials. While Lewis thinks that natural law does not depend on any sectarian philosophy of life, not even the Christian or Judeo-Christian views, he does see a Christian shape to the larger narrative of human history. It is perhaps in this way that his addresses at the University of Durham in 1943 best fit the founding purpose of the Riddell Memorial Lectures. There is for Lewis a Christian metahistory that frames the events of human life and gives shape to them. In The Discarded Image, Lewis states that Christians will see history as “a story with a divine plot.”55 Its central event for Lewis is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ,56 and it will come to an end someday in God’s time, whether by the H-bomb or some other means.57 There is teleology to history for

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Lewis, even a specifically Christian one, though he makes no claims that we can use even a Christian metahistory as a tool to understand any particular “trend in the world depicted.”58 To do so would be to shift from history to historicism, albeit with a “Christian” moniker, which is no better than any other type of historicism. Still, the big picture of history is clear when seen from a Christian perspective, and it is important to realize that it is this understanding that gives ethical and metaphysical significance to the events of human history. Christianity teaches that God created man in his own image; mankind fell in the form of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, introducing sin and a sinful nature into humanity; Jesus Christ died to pay the price of sin, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven; and he is coming again to bring history to its conclusion. Surely the Christian understanding of the metapattern to history assigns significance to human actions, for they reflect, as it were, on their creator. Human actions are significant as well because they have consequences in eternity. While Lewis writes of a universal moral law, he does so from within a Christian framework that informs his analysis. “UNILINEAR PROGRESS” OR “FATAL SERIALISM”? Despite its Christian metahistory and teleology, one thing history does not demonstrate in Lewis’s view is any clearly defined sense of progress in which things are improving over the ages. It would be a na¨ıve person indeed who can look at the history of the modern era and see moral progress. Technology has progressed at a rapid rate in modern times, but no complementary moral advance has accompanied the technological advances. Simply because something is new does not mean that it is better, and Lewis makes it clear in The Abolition of Man that he has no tolerance for the popular modern notion of out-and-out progress. Lewis gladly acknowledges that Owen Barfield, a fellow Inkling and the “wisest and best of [his] unofficial teachers,”59 taught him “not to patronize the past”60 by valorizing the present. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis calls the na¨ıve belief in unmitigated progress “chronological snobbery,” and he defines it as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”61 Chronological snobbery reflects arrogance toward ourselves and a corollary disdain for those who have gone before us— and who, ironically, share the same essential humanity we possess and which provides the foundation of modern advances. At bottom, it is unrealistic and does not square with the facts of history. Unfortunately in Lewis’s view, the paradigm in which many modern people think is precisely this one of na¨ıve progress. In The Abolition of Man Lewis calls such a view “the fatal serialism of the modern imagination—the image

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of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds.”62 Such na¨ıve faith in progress was the ruling paradigm in Lewis’s day, and it is yet today. Perhaps because of the obvious evidence of progress in technology, modern people find it difficult to understand that what is new is not on that account necessarily better. Technological progress makes it easy to think there is a similar progress in ethics as well. But such a view does not square with reality, as even a cursory consideration of the history of the twentieth century would demonstrate. Two world wars, countless bloody coups, Soviet gulags, ethnic cleansing in the Baltics and Africa, and the terrorism of the twenty-first century—progress? History is not a linear march upward. For Lewis any such view of history is a myth.63 One reason why we cannot expect a “unilinear progression” in history is that human nature remains essentially the same in all places and at all times. Are we not made in the image of our parents64 as well as in the image of God?65 In The Allegory of Love, Lewis uses the image of a train to remind us that one reason why we study old poetry is because we share a common humanity with the old poets. “Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations,” Lewis writes; “being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.”66 If humans did not remain essentially the same, there would be no ground for natural law, and Lewis’s Appendix to The Abolition of Man would be a mere curiosity about historical coincidences. As it is, however, natural law is universal and objective. The unchanging essence of human nature is one of those assumptions we must make if we are to think at all. “If nothing is self-evident,” Lewis declares in The Abolition of Man, “nothing can be proved.”67 We must accept the fact of an essentially unchanging humanity as a premise if we are to enter the arena of logic or ethics and, if we accept such a premise, it is impossible to see history as a story of progressive improvement. In fact, if we accept Lewis’s premise that human nature is essentially constant, we concede the conclusions of The Abolition of Man and the Appendix becomes an indictment of modern culture as the first civilization to normalize a wholesale subjectivism. A second reason why history is not progressing is that “the doctrine of the Second Coming is deeply uncongenial to the whole evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought.”68 The Christian revelation of history in the New Testament “foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without.”69 There is no suggestion in the New Testament that humankind improves with time and will one day enter a peaceful millennium on the basis of humanitarian and benevolent efforts. To be sure, Lewis goes well beyond his own understanding of natural law when as a Christian he adopts the New Testament account of the eschaton, for he regards natural law to be innate in

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all people and not a specifically Christian ethic.70 Perhaps the best way to understand Lewis’s apparent shift here is to remember that this is another one of those self-evident premises that make thought possible. While Lewis does not think that the Christian revelation can speak to particular incidents or even periods in history, it most emphatically does speak to the end of history. It may well be that for Lewis the Christian paradigm of history speaks most authoritatively to the fall and apocalypse, rather than to the events of nationstates, which occur between those two book-ending events in human history. In John’s Apocalypse a sovereign God judges that humans have not improved since the days of Noah or Christ and therefore brings history to a cataclysmic close.71 There is no hope in the Book of Revelation for redemption from within humankind. In the same way, hopes for a better future on the basis of political ideology or economic improvement are vain in Lewis’s view as well. Both Fascism and Communism lead to tyranny on the one hand and slavery on the other. In this regard, Aeschliman writes in The Restitution of Man of “Marxist scientism” and its “scientific socialism” and states that it is nothing but an “empty promise of historical inevitability and its tragically real tyranny and barbarism.”72 The ideologies of progress are thinly veiled tyrannical dystopias, and this is so because of human sin and greed. Lewis is quite clear in The Abolition of Man when he writes, “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument,” and again, “Man’s conquest of Nature . . . means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.”73 While this may be the future as Lewis thought of it in 1943, it is not a desirable one, and he wrote in order to forestall that possibility. MAN’S SELF-ABOLITION As Lewis took stock in the 1940s, he saw the moral trajectory of modernity as a downward one. He said so publicly in the Riddell Memorial Lectures in February 1943. In December of the same year, he wrote to Arthur C. Clarke that a human race concerned only with technological power and with no regard for ethics would be “a cancer on the universe.”74 He had not changed his mind some fifteen years later when he wrote “Religion and Rocketry” and stated, “Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man.”75 In the first two Ransom Trilogy books, Weston and Devine are obvious examples of the dehumanizing and acquisitive nature of humankind. So too are most of the “scientists” in the N.I.C.E. [the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments”] in That Hideous Strength (the third in the trilogy and published in 1945). The

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“Progressive Element” at Belbury in That Hideous Strength includes such former human beings as Frost, Wither, Straik, and Fairy Hardcastle, whose names alone are enough to intimate Lewis’s attitude toward them. Wither, the Deputy Director of the Institute, is a frightening portrait of a man who has jettisoned the Tao and, along with it, his essential humanity. The lesbian Fairy Hardcastle in her Gestapo boots and smoking her cigar is in the final throes of perverted femininity. And Straik is theologically obtuse enough to think that the N.I.C.E. will usher in the Kingdom of God on this earth. All of these “educated” people bow down to “the Head”—a human head apparently kept alive at Belbury by blood transfusions. Here is a brave new world indeed. Lewis knew that a culture that jettisoned the Tao and allowed a group of elite rulers—the conditioners—to rule without recourse to a common morality would ultimately bow before the irrational impulses of its leaders.76 Under these circumstances we should not expect improvement, but decline. Many would argue that in fact this has been the history of the west in the last half of the twentieth century and into the beginning of the new millennium. The decline Lewis perceived in the culture of his day is nothing less than man’s self-abolition. If humans can change their morality in some substantive way—if they can step outside of the Tao, to use Lewis’s terms—then they become something other than human. Lewis is explicit in “The Poison of Subjectivism,” where he writes, “Out of this apparently innocent idea [to ‘improve our morality’] comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as men choose their clothes.”77 In what way would forming a new morality bring an “end to our species” and even “damn our souls”? The idea of forming a new morality is simply a disguise for the desire for power. It transforms the human subject of government into the object of control, the end (human beings) into the means (that is, to establish power for the elite). In The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, Alan Jacobs states, “Modern humanists, like the scientists and magicians of the Renaissance, seek power and control rather than wisdom. That is how they have cut themselves off from the moral law—what Lewis calls the Tao—and are contributing, not to the enrichment of humanity, but to its abolition.”78 By abolishing the traditional morality that has survived throughout history until modern times, they abandon wisdom and opt for power. In the past, “rulers” generally ruled for the good of the people, their subjects. In the future, “leaders” who are outside the Tao will rule people as “domestic animals” for their own purposes and use their own “morality” to justify their tyranny.79 Machiavellian? Yes. Nietzschean? Certainly. Inevitable? Only if we do not hold ourselves to the objective standard of natural law. If we reject natural law, we become “men

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without chests” or “mere artifacts,” in Lewis’s words.80 This is the trajectory in modern life that so concerns Lewis in The Abolition of Man. What makes the threat of man’s self-abolition so significant a threat to civilization in the 1940s is the fact that prior to the twentieth century, no civilized state had been able to change the moral thinking of the masses of its people. There had been tyrants in the past, to be sure, and they certainly imposed their will on their people. And this is precisely the point—they imposed their will on a people against accepted moral codes. But with a tyrant like Hitler, all that changed. Lewis makes very few references to Hitler in The Abolition of Man, choosing rather to address the metaphysical and moral issues he sees in modern life. At the same time, however, Hitler’s rise to power represents one example of a change in the rules of engagement for civilized societies. “‘Good’ and ‘bad,’ applied to [leaders like Hitler] are words without content,” Lewis says, “for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived.”81 Leaders like Hitler define the rules of engagement in a Machiavellian way to enable their own desires to be met. Hitler faced little opposition to his plan to exterminate Jews and use them in hideously inhumane experiments, for he was forming “the master race” in the Germany of the Third Reich. In the case of Hitler it is that too few people called his actions immoral and took a stand against them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised the alarm, but there were not enough Bonhoeffers in Germany or in Western Europe at large in the 1930s and early 1940s to stop Hitler’s advance. By the time the Churchills of the world had the public ear, Hitler was occupying foreign territories in Europe and the rest of Europe awaited what appeared to be inevitable. In The Abolition of Man, however, Hitler is a symptom, not a cause. The cause, in Lewis’s view, for why a Hitler was able to rise to power and mobilize such a vast war machine was the hitherto unthinkable nexus of a decade of brainwashing of the German people and Hitler’s access to “the powers of an omnicompetent state” with “irresistible scientific technique.”82 It is the union of eugenics and technology that makes man’s self-abolition possible, and the Third Reich represented that possibility all too obviously for Lewis in 1943. Lewis’s concern is clear in the last chapter of The Abolition of Man: The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have “taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho” and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?83

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The lack of an objective moral code, the presence of effective psychologizing, eugenics, education, and the political power to make it happen—these are the ingredients in man’s abolition of himself. It is this nexus that presented the philosophical and ethical dilemma Lewis addresses in The Abolition of Man. Nor is this nightmare limited to the Third Reich of Germany or even Europe in the 1940s alone; it can happen in any modern state that wishes it to happen. Not even an international state, or a megastate, would change the picture substantively. The same conditioning can go on across national lines as well as within them. Lewis expresses his anxieties about a global state in the context of his apprehension about the abuse of science. In “Is Progress Possible,” he writes: We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present.84

Unless there is an agreed-upon moral code, there are no grounds on which to condemn the Third Reich or any regime like it—or even a world Welfare State. All that remains is our subjective preferences, which simply happen to digress from those of others. Hitler would grant that and take the same privilege for himself, and leaders of a world state, along with their scientist lackeys, would do the same. Lewis raised the alarm on one other front in the last chapter of The Abolition of Man, and that is the effects of the engrained subjectivism in modern life on future generations of people. A culture that allows its leaders to create their own moralities and so condition people in society—as at the worst modern media and “politicians” (not “statesmen”) are guilty—exercises power over later generations, a power that they have not conceded and likely would not concede. As each generation modifies the environment and the rules of engagement, it “exercises power over its successors.”85 It limits the options of later generations by making choices for its own benefit, rather than passing on the heritage of traditional morality that so many generations of human beings have passed on to their children. The conditioners will not pass on what they received from the Tao as their ancestors did for them. It will no longer be “grown birds” teaching “young birds” to fly, as Lewis puts it.86 Rather, the conditioners will pass on a new understanding of morality, and this is a redefinition of humanity—or, more properly, the abolition of humanity as we know it. The effect of a reality without the Tao is to make successive generations the patients of the power of the present Conditioners. “There is therefore no

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question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.”87 The Nietzschean bargain of power without obligation proves to be fool’s gold, for the power so acquired contains the seeds of its own destruction. No natural law? Lewis asks; no ultimate power either. There is simply a law of diminishing returns inherent in the subjectivist position that makes each of man’s conquests over nature a conquest of nature over man.88 Seen along the axis of time no less than in the modern period on its own, the subjectivists make a fool’s bargain, simply inviting the next strong leader to subjugate them the way they subjugated others. As Lewis said in another context, “Where is the rot to end?” to which he answers, “We must never allow the rot to begin.”89 CONCLUSION: THE GREAT TRADITION IN WESTERN HISTORY In a society where the rot has already begun, and is even well advanced, how do we stem the tide, and perhaps turn it back? Does Lewis offer any hope in the face of advancing subjectivism in ethics and metaphysics? It has to be said that he sees no solutions from governments and politicians. In “C. S. Lewis in the Public Square,” Richard John Neuhaus states that Lewis had a “studied skepticism toward the search for political or legal fixes for human problems.”90 Public policy applied from the outside is not likely to solve human problems that are, finally, internal and ethical. Legislation cannot solve the problems either, for social problems are the results, not the causes, of ethical problems. Political and legal matters are simply manifestations of the human problem. Likewise, Lewis does not trust the “empowered elite”91 to resolve social and legal problems. In fact, in a society divested of natural law, the leaders are the ones who arrogate power to themselves for their own ends no matter how they may frame “moral” arguments to defend their actions. For such a society, Lewis can offer no panaceas to anesthetize the lazy “trousered ape”92 who simply wants the government to do his ethical thinking for him. At the same time, however, Lewis does offer hope if we have the moral courage to shoulder our responsibility toward our children. The hope Lewis offers rests in our passing along the great tradition of western culture to our children. Lewis begins The Abolition of Man with concern over what education two English school textbooks give to their readers. At first glance, the issue appears modest enough, and perhaps too insignificant for a major university lecture like the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Durham. Lewis knows, however, how important the

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matter is and understands that the problem and the solution share the same provenance—education. The hope for the future, in Lewis’s view, is to teach our children objective values and objective truths. The hope lies in right ethics and right metaphysics. Right Ethics In a practical sense, the best education we can give our children is training in right ethics based on natural law, or the Tao. In the face of modern subjectivism in morals, teaching right morals is the burden of The Abolition of Man, and it is fitting that Lewis would begin the first chapter of the book with an apparently harmless school textbook, which nevertheless inculcates the unwary and ignorant schoolchild with a thorough-going subjectivism in values. In the second chapter, Lewis challenges the reader to restore the “chest,” by which he means rightly educated virtues and sentiments—in short, to reverse the drift toward subjectivism in values. And in the final chapter, he teases out the frightening implications of not teaching our children proper ethical thinking. Gilbert Meilaender is certainly correct in his recognition of the emphasis Lewis places on moral education. Meilaender writes, “This stress on moral education could be said to be the strongest and most permanent theme of Lewis’s ethic.”93 If we do not have the courage to teach our children the virtues that are their birthright, we surrender the future to leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and any petty technocrat who can foist his personal values on people who will not know enough to rebel. Educate the chest, Lewis says, for the chest is what makes us human. We educate the chest by teaching children the eternal verities and the eternal values. To return to Lewis’s illustration from Coleridge early on in The Abolition of Man, the waterfall is inherently sublime. “Sublimity,” when applied to the waterfall in question, is not a feature of the observer’s emotions; it is a characteristic of the waterfall itself. Because sublimity is a characteristic of the waterfall, it is “eternal” in the sense that it does not change as an observer’s emotions will. Whatever is true is true eternally. The same goes for values, for they too are eternal. Whatever is inherently virtuous is eternally and universally virtuous, and whatever is inherently evil is eternally and universally evil. Cowardice, theft, tyranny, and lust are all inherently evil; courage, honor, self-sacrifice, and love are all inherently good. No amount of subjectivist “rot” will change this objective state of affairs. In truth and values rightly understood, there is something eternal; it is “the way things are.” In Not a Tame Lion, Bruce L. Edwards notes that Lewis “adopted the perspective of eternity”94 in his apologetics throughout the Narnian stories, and he adopts the eternal point of view in The Abolition of Man as well (and

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in all of his writings, for that matter). In writing of God’s love for us and the love for him we should develop in this life and most certainly will experience in heaven, Lewis himself states in The Four Loves, “all that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”95 Lewis’s comments on God’s love in The Four Loves are particularly helpful in our analysis of The Abolition of Man because they remind us that love is an action, a moral choice to put another first. In love, as in all ethical behavior, the eternal enters the temporal. Meilaender says it well in “The Everyday C. S. Lewis,” where he writes about “This sense that eternal issues are at stake in the mundane choices of our every day life.”96 To train our children in natural law is to give them eternity’s perspective. Educate the chest—the eternal values. Right Metaphysics We end with Lewis’s view of right metaphysics, and to do that we return to Lewis’s understanding of the Christian metanarrative of human history. Lewis’s Christian perspective of history is grounded in two important considerations—natural law and historicism. First, Lewis insists that natural law is not a narrowly Christian moral code, but rather a universal moral law inherent in all human beings. Were the Appendix the only part of The Abolition of Man he had written, it would be evident that he believed natural law to be universal and objective. But we have the whole book, and its three chapters spell out the reality of natural law and the moral and epistemological dangers of rejecting that innate moral code. Second, Lewis does not think that historians can identify the character of an era in history or discover the meaning of a particular period of history. For Lewis, all such claims are neither objective nor historical; they are merely subjective and historicist. At the same time, however, there is an obvious metanarrative or metapattern, if we can call it that, to the trajectory of history that allows us to see significance in human actions. And this metanarrative coincides with the Christian understanding of human history, at least in the broad picture. Within the framework of these two caveats Lewis exhorts us to reclaim the great tradition of western culture from the past and lay hold of the future for our children. The great tradition in western civilization provides continuity and allows for development. There is a tension, to be sure, between progress and stability, but understood from within the Tao the tension is healthy. At the end of the second chapter of The Abolition of Man, Lewis insists that it is impossible for us to invent a new system of morality by stepping outside of the tradition of natural law and still remain human. As we have seen, this is what he means by “men without chests”—men who have adopted a subjective

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morality and have become something other than men. In the context of this claim, however, Lewis states that some progress is not only possible, but is also necessary. “Some criticism [of current social mores, for instance], some removal of contradictions,” Lewis writes, “is required.”97 In other words, we can develop the moral law from within its own framework and bring about moral advances.98 In this way we can improve our understanding and application of natural law, as long as we do not attempt to redefine it in any essential or substantive manner. In “C. S. Lewis on Mere Science,” Michael Aeschliman states that Lewis was “a believer in the essential sanity and continuity of Western Civilization,”99 and the Tao is certainly one of the primary ways in which western civilization remains stable and progresses—and even survives, for that matter. In the end, we must counter the subjectivism in metaphysics and ethics in modern culture with the thoroughgoing objectivism of the great tradition in western civilization. Reality is real. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. The apostle Paul had it correct when he spoke of creation revealing the deity,100 and the conscience “accusing and excusing” all human beings on the basis of their actions.101 The antidote to the decline in modern society is to reassert the great tradition that is our heritage from our fathers. In The Restitution of Man, Aeschliman states, “To the debilitating modernism which counts nothing sacred, Lewis juxtaposed the health of vital tradition, which he strove to enrich and transmit.”102 This is the burden of The Abolition of Man— to transmit to our children the great tradition of natural law. We must, in Richard Neuhaus’s words, make “the very best arguments we can. . . . And we should tell better stories that winsomely, even seductively, reintroduce the Great Story.”103 In his apologetic books, Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis makes the “best arguments” to modern man by providing a logical defense of natural law in a culture where many saw values subjectively. In stories like The Chronicles of Narnia, the Ransom Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces, Lewis tells “better stories” by writing well-told narratives that point to the moral responsibility of all human beings and the good news of the great rescue that is available to all. “The task of the modern educator,” Lewis writes, “is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”104 Lewis did so at the University of Durham on those three days in February 1943, and he does so to those of us who come after in the pages of The Abolition of Man. NOTES 1. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (New York: HarperSan Francisco, 1996), 330–331.

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2. Warren Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1982), 178. 3. Ibid., 179. 4. At http://www.ncl.ac.uk/calendar/pdf/public lectures.pdf (accessed July 30, 2006). 5. Oxford’s publications of the Riddell Memorial Lectures prior to Lewis’s series included Oliver Chase Quick’s 1930 lectures, Philosophy and the Cross; William Ralph Inge’s 1932 series, The Eternal Values; J. L. Stocks’s, On the Nature and Grounds of Religious Belief (1933); the tenth series by F. M. Powicke on History, Freedom and Religion in 1938 (a significant topic given the state of affairs on the continent at the time); and the 1940 Riddell Lectures by Robert Henry Thouless entitled, Conventionalization and Assimilation in Religious Movements as Problems in Social Psychology. Subsequent to Lewis’s address, Oxford published the 1945 lectures by John Baillie, What is a Christian Civilization? The 1946 lectures were Science, Faith and Society by Michael Polanyi, and the 1947 series by Arthur David Ritchie was Science and Politics. 6. The author acknowledges the assistance of Laura Schmidt, Archivist at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, for the names of the authors and titles of the Riddell Memorial Lectures in the years before and after C. S. Lewis’s 1943 talks. 7. Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 786. 8. C. S. Lewis, Preface to That Hideous Strength (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 7. 9. C. S. Lewis, Letter to Mary, February 20, 1955, Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 37. 10. Walter Hooper, note 1 to “On Ethics” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 47. 11. John G. West, Jr. Essay on The Abolition of Man in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 68. 12. Ibid., 68. 13. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 86. 14. Doris T. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), 73. 15. Ibid., 74. 16. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 30. 17. Cf. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 78: “Apparently Lewis uses the term to get away from the associations the term ‘natural law’ has with Christian ethics, for he is attempting to write nontheistically rather than from a Christian viewpoint.” 18. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 31.

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19. Ibid., 35. 20. Ibid., 49. 21. C. S. Lewis, 49; cf. Mere Christianity, Foreword by Kathleen Norris (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 9–10. 22. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 52. Cf. 45, where Lewis argues that “sentiments,” such as “society ought to be preserved,” are in themselves rational principles and premises. It is only on the basis of these accepted premises that we can draw conclusions about value. 23. Compare “On Ethics,” 53 and “The Poison of Subjectivism” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1996), 75. 24. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 77. 25. Ibid., 67. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner states that the rule of the few over the many is “inevitable in the nature of cultural evolution” and that Lewis’s concern here amounts to something on the order of paranoia. See B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971), 206. 26. Ibid., 76. Contra Lewis, B. F. Skinner writes of the “autonomous man—the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity” as one who needs to be “abolished” as soon as possible. See Skinner, 200. 27. Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 76. 28. Ibid., 82–83. Lewis even writes of a “regenerate science” that would apply scientific advances in a humane and charitable way (p. 85). Compare Lewis’s comments in a letter to Arthur C. Clarke, December 7, 1943, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 593–594. The whole of this letter considers the issue of scientism. 29. Ibid., 83–84. 30. Ibid., 82–85. 31. Ibid., 81. 32. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, 82. 33. C. S. Lewis, “Historicism” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 105. 34. Ibid., 100–101. 35. Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994), 12. 36. C. S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum” in Selected Literary Essays (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 3. 37. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 63. 38. C. S. Lewis, “Historicism” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1967), 100. 39. Gilbert Meilaender, The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis (Vancouver, OR: Regent College Publishing, 2003), 5.

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40. Ibid., 101. 41. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 3. 42. Ibid., 3. John G. West makes the point that Lewis rejected the idea of “a peculiarly ‘Christian’ morality’ in favor of a ‘natural moral law known by all through human reason.’” John G. West, “Finding the Permanent in the Political: C. S. Lewis as a Political Thinker,” at http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command= view&id=457&printer, 3. (Accessed July 30, 2006) 43. C. S. Lewis, “Is Progress Possible?” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 314. 44. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 77: Lewis lists truth, mercy, beauty, and happiness as examples of the virtues found in Natural Law, or the Tao. 45. John Warwick Montgomery, The Shape of the Past: A Christian Response to Secular Philosophies of History (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1975), 55–56, n.3. 46. John Randolph Willis, Pleasures Forevermore: The Theology of C. S. Lewis (Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1983), 104. 47. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 30. 48. Meilaender, The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis, 200. 49. John G. West, “C. S. and the Materialist Menace” at http://www.discovery. org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=458&printerFri, 5. (Accessed July 30, 2006) 50. Rom. 2:14–15 (Authorized—King James—Version) 51. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 28–30, 31. 52. Ibid., 77. 53. Ibid., 31. 54. Meilaender, The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis, 210, Lewis’s emphasis. 55. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176. 56. C. S. Lewis, “The Grand Miracle,” in Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 143, 144. Essentially the same chapter is found in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 80–88. 57. C. S. Lewis, “Is Progress Possible?” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, 312. 58. Ibid., 176. 59. C. S. Lewis, Dedication to The Allegory of Love (New York: Galaxy Book, 1958), np. 60. Ibid.

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61. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 207. 62. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 86. 63. C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harvest Books, 1960), 101. 64. Gen. 5:3. 65. Gen. 1:26–27. 66. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 1. 67. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 53. Compare “On Ethics,” 55. 68. C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night,” 100. Lewis goes to some pains in this article to establish the fact that his comments on evolution relate to the “popular” understanding of evolution as na¨ıve progress, not to the scientific Darwinian thinking (about which he has particular views as well). In other words, Lewis is not deriding science but the superficial interpretation of evolution as progressive improvement. 69. Ibid., 101. 70. See note 34. 71. See for instance Rev 9:20–21; 11:15b; 18:1–3; 20:11–5. 72. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 32. 73. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 67, 69. 74. C. S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur C. Clarke, December 7, 1943, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2, 594. 75. C. S. Lewis, “Religion and Rocketry” in “The World’s Last Night” and Other Essays (New York: Harvest, 1959), 89. 76. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 76. 77. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Christian Reflections, 73. 78. Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 186. Lewis makes the same point in The Abolition of Man: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is technique . . .” (pp. 83–84). 79. Lewis’s distinction between “rulers” and “leaders” is that rulers rule for the people, while leaders rule over the people and it is found in “Is Progress Possible,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, 314. 80. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 74. 81. Ibid., 73. 82. Ibid., 71. 83. Ibid., 69–70, italics the author’s. 84. C. S. Lewis, “Is Progress Possible?” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, 315. 85. Ibid., 68.

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86. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 34. 87. Ibid., 68–69. 88. Ibid., 79–80. 89. C. S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 215. 90. Richard John Neuhaus, “C. S. Lewis in the Public Square,” First Things 88 (December 1998), 30. 91. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 76. 92. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 23. 93. Meilaender, The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis, 199. 94. Bruce L. Edwards, Not a Tame Lion: Unveil Narnia through the Eyes of Lucy, Peter, and Other Characters Created by C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005), 189. 95. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 188. 96. Gilbert Meilaender, “The Everyday C. S. Lewis,” First Things 85 (August/ September 1998): 29. 97. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 56. 98. Ibid., 57. 99. M. D. Aeschliman, “C. S. Lewis on Mere Science,” First Things 86 (October 1998), 17. 100. Rom. 1:19–20. 101. Rom. 2:15. 102. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 7. 103. Neuhaus, “C. S. Lewis in the Public Square,” First Things 88 (December 1998): 35. 104. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 27. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aeschliman, M. D. “C. S. Lewis on Mere Science,” First Things 86 (October 1998), 16–18. ———. The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. Edwards, Bruce L. Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual World of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. New York: HarperSan Francisco, 1996. ———. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.

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———. Ed. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Kreeft, Peter. C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ———.The Allegory of Love. New York: Galaxy Books, 1958. ———. Christian Reflections. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. ———. “De Descriptione Temporum.” In Selected Literary Essays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ———. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. ———. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960. ———. “The Grand Miracle.” In Miracles: A Preliminary Study. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, 143, 144. Essentially the same chapter is found in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996, 80–88. ———. “Historicism.” In Christian Reflections. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. ———. “Is Progress Possible?” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996, 314. ———. Letters to an American Lady. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. ———. “Meditation in a Toolshed.” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. ———. Mere Christianity. Foreword by Kathleen Norris. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. ———. “Religion and Rocketry.” In “The World’s Last Night” and Other Essays. New York: Harvest, 1959, 83–92. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955. ———. That Hideous Strength. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ———. “The World’s Last Night.” The World’s Last Night and Other Essays. New York: Harvest Books, 1960. Lewis, Warren. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1982.

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Meilaender, Gilbert. “The Everyday C. S. Lewis.” First Things 85 (August/September, 1998): 27–33. ———. The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis. Vancouver, OR: Regent College Publishing, 2003. Montgomery, John Warwick. The Shape of the Past: A Christian Response to Secular Philosophies of History. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1975, 55–56, n.3. Myers, Doris T. C. S. Lewis in Context. Kent, UK: Kent State University Press, 1994, 73. Neuhaus, Richard John “C. S. Lewis in the Public Square.” First Things 88 (December 1998): 30–35. Skinner, B. F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971, 206. West, John G. “The Abolition of Man.” The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998, 68–70. ———. “C. S. and the Materialist Menace,” http://www.discovery.org/scripts/ viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=458&printerFri. Accessed July 30, 2006. ———. “Finding the Permanent in the Political: C. S. Lewis as a Political Thinker,” http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id= 457&printerFri. Accessed July 30, 2006. Willis, John Randolph. Pleasures Forevermore: The Theology of C. S. Lewis. Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1983, 104.

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The Great Divorce: Journey to Heaven and Hell1 Wayne Martindale

INTRODUCTION I begin with a confession: I have not always wanted to go to Heaven. I can see now that many myths had unconsciously crowded into my mind: fuzzy logic conspired with pictures of stuffy mansion houses and ghosts walking on golden (therefore barren and cold) streets. Perhaps my biggest fear, until some time after my undergraduate years, was that Heaven would be boring. I knew I should want to go to Heaven, but I didn’t. I would have said that I want to go to Heaven when I die, but mainly, I just didn’t want to go to Hell. My problem was a badly warped theology and a thoroughly starved imagination. I knew that in Heaven we would worship God forever. But the only model I had for worship was church, and frankly, I wasn’t in love with church enough to want it to go on through ages of ages, world without end. My mental image was of Reverend Cant droning on forever and ever. Somewhere in the back of my mind, quite unconsciously, Heaven was an extended, boring church service like those I had not yet learned to appreciate on earth—with this exception: you never got to go home to the roast beef dinner. What a way to anticipate my eternal destiny. But then I read C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. It awakened in me an appetite for something better than roast beef. It aroused a longing to inherit what I was created for: that which would fulfill my utmost longings and engender new longings and fulfill

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those, too. After reading The Great Divorce, for the first time in my life, I felt Heaven to be both utterly real and utterly desirable. It was a magnificent gift. Small wonder, then, that The Great Divorce has always been one of my favorite books because when I read it, it awakened me to my spiritual anorexia. I was starving for heavenly food and didn’t even know I was hungry. Since then, I’ve read everything Lewis has written—at least everything published—and that reading has only expanded both my understanding of Heaven and Hell and my desire for Heaven, but none of that reading has bumped The Great Divorce from first place in thinking about eternity. To borrow a phrase from Lewis, it “baptized my imagination.” Few writers bring to any subject Lewis’s theological sophistication, historical grasp, imaginative range, and clarity of expression. My hope for this study is to advance Lewis’s agenda: not only to enhance the reader’s understanding, but to awaken or energize the sense of wonder and desire for our eternal home, and to eagerly anticipate that glorious day when we leave the shadowlands for good. CONTEXT AND DESIGN The Great Divorce was read in 1944, as it was being written, to the Inklings, an auspicious group of writers including Lewis, Tolkien, and Lewis’s brother Warnie, among others. By the time he published The Great Divorce serially in a magazine called The Guardian in 1945 and then as a separate volume in 1946, Lewis had already written the book that catapulted him onto the cover of Time Magazine (1947) and won a large American following, The Screwtape Letters (1942); this work plus The Problem of Pain (1940), which contains key chapters on Heaven and Hell, provide important background to The Great Divorce. But the work that made his the most well-known voice in England (only after Winston Churchill’s) was the BBC broadcasts from 1941 to 1944 that were eventually published as Mere Christianity (1952). He had also published the first two volumes of the Space or Ransom Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and had finished writing the third, That Hideous Strength. All of these works are in one way or another about choices and their consequences, a major theme carried forward in The Great Divorce, which he took up immediately on the heels of the Trilogy. But as with many of Lewis’s books, the idea had been on his mind for a decade, which we know from his brother Warren’s notation in his diary for April 16, 1933: “Jack has an idea for a religious work based on the opinion of some of the Fathers that while punishment for the damned is eternal, it is intermittent: he proposes to do a sort of infernal day excursion to Paradise.”2 This idea allowed him to develop further the themes introduced in these earlier books: Heaven as fulfillment,

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Hell as sham and waste, and early choice as pregnant with eternity. Of course, as Lewis himself pointed out, most of his ideas will be found in some fashion in the works of George MacDonald. Lewis thought enough of MacDonald to produce an anthology of 365 readings, mostly from Unspoken Sermons. Two small quotes from entries Lewis labeled “Heaven” and “Hell” will suffice to illustrate his indebtedness. On “Heaven”: “For the only air of the soul, in which it can breathe and live, is the present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home, our all-right place”; and on “Hell”: “The one principle of hell is—‘I am my own!’ ”3 Here are the core ideas of rich fruit so nourishing in The Great Divorce. A whole essay could be written on Lewis’s literary debts, which would certainly include attention to the Bible, Augustine, Dante, Milton, Thomas Traherne (“golden and genial”), and large swaths of MacDonald. All urge the reader to choose completion in our Creator. In The Great Divorce, all who are in Hell can take a bus to Heaven, if they wish, though few even wish it. The idea for this “holiday from hell” came from Lewis’s reading of Jeremy Taylor, a seventeenth-century divine, shortly after Lewis’s own conversion. Taylor mentions reading the obscure idea of a “refrigerium” or respite from suffering in a Parisian missal.4 Does Lewis believe that souls in Hell actually have a “second chance” or even an occasional rest for the damned? Absolutely not. He says in the Preface that he chose The Great Divorce as the title to deliberately contradict William Blake’s notion—expressed in his title “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” a satiric reworking of Milton—that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and that opposites must marry before progress is possible.5 But, Lewis insists, reality presents us with an “‘either-or.’ If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”6 Lewis puts it this way in The Problem of Pain: “We can understand Hell in its aspect of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”7 Lewis deliberately casts the whole story as a dream vision (as we learn from the subtitle and are reminded at the end) to emphasize the fictional nature of the story—and anything can happen in dreams. Why, then, does Lewis allow the “hellians” to journey to Heaven and stay if they want?8 Simply to stress (1) that we choose our eternal destinies, and (2) that by our life choices we turn ourselves into beings suited for one or the other. By presenting his characters at the entrance to Heaven, Lewis can show at once both the process that damns and the result. We hear the hellians’ reasons for rejecting Heaven, and as they leave for the “gray town” (Hell), we

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instantly see the consequence. Tellingly, those from Hell usually fail to even see the beauties of Heaven and most hasten back to Hell. The very first Ghost from the gray town to be mentioned (besides the narrator) doesn’t last even a minute in Heaven. “‘I don’t like it! I don’t like it,’ screamed a voice, ‘It gives me the pip!’”9 With that she ran to the bus and never returned. What follows upon their arrival in Heaven is a series of loosely organized encounters between the Ghosts and an appropriate heavenly counterpart. Like its cousin, The Screwtape Letters, the design is episodic: there isn’t much plot. Although we come to identify with the narrator and his final fate, the interest is not mainly in the resolution of a central conflict or the development of a single character. Rather, our interest is in what sort of persons will take the stage next, what has kept them from Heaven, and what their response will be to the invitation to enter all joy. In the process, we get a short course on human nature and the psychology of sin. Also like The Screwtape Letters, in The Great Divorce Lewis blends elements of earth with his vision of Hell. In the latter book, he blends elements of earth with Heaven, too. This not only makes Hell and Heaven more understandable because of the familiar earthly elements, but it makes us grasp the truth that “there is no neutral ground in the universe.”10 It points up the further truth that we bring into our earthly experience intimations of either Heaven or Hell by our choices. We are becoming every moment souls suited for one or the other. You will have met people who are so full of the spirit of Christ that any destiny other than Heaven is unthinkable. These people also have many of the joys that will characterize Heaven, even in the midst of earthly pain. You will also have met people who hate goodness: who prefer evil companions and evil acts though it makes them wretched and miserable. When they do encounter good persons, they condemn them, perverting their sense of reason by rationalizing evil, even finding ways to blame the good, or God, or religion for their problems and those of the world. They already hate goodness because it implicitly condemns the evil they have chosen. They wouldn’t like Heaven if they could have it. They are, in a sense, already in Hell, preferring darkness to light. This we see in each of the Ghosts that returns to Hell. On the book’s design, Evan Gibson notes, the Ghosts and the people from Heaven who meet them are presented in three divisions: five in the first half, five in the last half, and a group in the middle getting short treatment, all having in common a foolish desire to criticize Heaven. Some come all the way from Hell just to spit at Heaven in spite.11 The first five Ghosts are all inwardly focused. Their besetting sins are: “their inflated inner-image, their intellectual dishonesty, their materialism, their cynicism, their false shame.”12 The five in the second half are also selfish, but their sin involves the desire to

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control others. Except for the first one, an artist, all in this last group exhibit some kind of perverted family relationship. As with The Screwtape Letters, we learn by negative example how not to behave and by inference how we should behave. It is a series of lessons in Kingdom values, like the parables of Jesus. From the Theological Ghost, we learn that we can slip from a desire to know God and a love of God to a desire to know about God and a love of mere academic, theological pursuit. The Theological Ghost would rather return to Hell where he can dispute about Christ than enter Heaven and know Him. Similarly, the Painter Ghost has slipped successively from loving light and truth, to loving the medium, to loving his own opinions of truth, to loving his reputation. He learns from a heavenly counterpart that no one is much interested in his work, now that he has been dead a while. He instantly abandons Heaven in a vain attempt to restore his now discredited reputation and resurrect his school of painting. Journals, lectures, manifestos, and publicity—these fill his mind as he abandons Truth and ultimately his true self for pretensions. We also meet a mother who is possessive of her son, and a wife whose earthly life was devoted to remaking her husband in her own image. Both would rather see their family members in Hell for the chance of controlling them than find true love in Heaven, love that cares about the real good of another. In the process of grasping, like all the hellians, they pervert their own personalities and become the sin they choose. Though on the brink of Heaven, all the Ghosts from Hell could say with Milton’s Satan: The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.13 Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.14

The Great Divorce shows us a parallel truth, one preeminently displayed in Dante’s vision: that neither the punishment of Hell nor the reward of Heaven is arbitrary. Lewis’s heavenly guide, MacDonald, explains this in the case of the Grumbling Ghost: The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye’ll have had experiences . . . it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”15

One of the central truths the book teaches is that Heaven is the fulfillment of human potential, Hell the drying up of human potential. “To enter heaven

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is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself ) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’”16 Hell strips away distinctions, and unrelieved sin is shown to be boring. On the other hand, in Heaven we blossom into fully differentiated personalities. DESIRE AND CHOICE In discussing this book, we’ll have to spend a little time in Lewis’s imaginary Hell, but we’ll leave that mildewed place for the fresh outdoor world of Heaven before long to look at some of the positive truths that make it so desirable. First, a disclaimer: Lewis’s own. He says in the Preface that he is not attempting to describe either Hell or Heaven as he thinks it literally appears as landscape. His real concerns are to show that Heaven is more real than any present physical reality and is the fulfillment of God’s desires for us, and that Hell is by comparison “so nearly nothing.” He is also concerned to show that everyone chooses his own eternal destiny by turning himself—with the Devil’s help or Christ’s—into a soul fit for Hell or a soul fit for Heaven. Throughout his works, Lewis’s most persistent theme is our desire for Heaven. Lacking a word to adequately describe this inmost hunger, he borrows one from Wordsworth and Coleridge: the word is “Joy.” It is a problematical term in that its usual meaning is happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment, whereas Lewis’s special use is nearly the opposite: It is the absence of satisfaction and fulfillment. He defines Joy as a “stab of desire” for something never satisfied on earth. But this longing is more desirable than any earthly possession or happiness and “to have it again” was the driving force behind much of his youth and early adulthood. When all of our natural desires have been fulfilled, “we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.”17 For this reason, it is a major pointer to Heaven and was key in Lewis’s own conversion.18 Lewis believes that every desire is at its root a desire for Heaven and would agree with Solomon that God has put eternity in our hearts.19 Augustine put it this way: “our heart is restless, until it repose in thee.” Therefore, we are all pilgrims in search of the Celestial City: some lost and looking for joy in all the wrong places, some saved with eyes fixed on the heavenly prize, and some sidetracked on dead-end streets and byways—but all longing for Heaven, whether we know it or not. Nearly all of Lewis’s works have the aim of arousing this desire for Heaven or showing us how to live in proper anticipation of our true home. Heaven is more sharply defined and more keenly desired when contrasted with Hell. So Lewis’s story, like Dante’s, opens in Hell. And as Dante has

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his mentor Virgil for a guide, so Lewis’s narrator has his mentor George MacDonald as guide. Though stabs of Joy date from his early childhood, Lewis had his desires for Heaven aroused in a special, life-altering way at the age of sixteen when he read George MacDonald’s Phantastes, so half way through The Great Divorce, on the outskirts of Heaven, the narrator (whose biographical details fit Lewis’s exactly) meets George MacDonald, who becomes his teacher. When the narrator asks his teacher if everyone has a chance to get on the bus, MacDonald replies with these soaring words: Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.20

The theme of choice and our responsibility to choose not only permeates The Great Divorce but is also found throughout Lewis’s works. Here’s another example from The Problem of Pain: In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.21

Each of the characters we meet fears that by accepting the invitation to Heaven they will have to give up something that has come to define them. True, they will be called upon to give up sin, but here we must remember Lewis’s biblical belief that all was created good and that sin involves choosing something good at the wrong time or in the wrong way. We come to see that each sin veils a common human longing that has its legitimate fulfillment. As these fears are exposed to the good light of Heaven, we learn that behind each is the one big fear: that some desire would be unfulfilled. If I went God’s way, I might lose out on something. What Lewis helps us discover is that all desires are, at rock-bottom, for Heaven. All of them. “There have been times,” says Lewis, “when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.”22 Even the earthly pleasures are but temporary signposts to the “solid joys” of Heaven. In examining the hellians’ fears and choices in contrast to those of the Solid people form Heaven, we will find something authentic and exhilarating to put in the place of the constriction that is sin.

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DESCENT INTO HELL The technique of using contrasts is central to Lewis’s success in portraying Heaven as desirable and Hell as repulsive. From the beginning, even before we learn that the story has opened in Hell, we find the place to be dreary, drab, and literally hollow, since it is a largely unoccupied shell. The people we encounter are peevish, self-centered, grasping, and unpleasant. In The Great Divorce, we never enter deep Hell or deep Heaven: We are only on the outskirts of each. Lewis’s opening vision of Hell is people standing in line, waiting for a bus that will take them to Heaven. None of the stereotypic flames in this portrayal of Hell. If we think of a foggy, drippy, London winter after the shops have all closed, we wouldn’t be far off. To the narrator’s surprise Hell is deserted. It is deserted because in Hell you can have anything you want by just wishing for it. Of course, the whole point of Hell is that you don’t wish for the right things. People there are always getting into arguments with the folks next door and wishing new houses into existence farther away from their nettlesome neighbors so that Hell is everexpanding. Napoleon is the nearest of the old rouges of history, and it took a visiting party 15,000 years to get to his place, only to discover him pacing back and forth. They watched him for a year, and all he ever did was pace and mutter, “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault,” and so on, endlessly.23 We may be tempted to think that Hell will be an entertaining place because it will have so many colorful people—a bully social club. From George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Groucho Marx to more contemporary comedians, we have heard the rationalizing quip that Hell is where fun is, with all the really interesting people. This has some of the zip of stolen pleasure in it, but we know that this sort of pleasure is a barbed hook and a cheat. So it is with the imagined social life of the “liberated” in Hell, where righteousness quells no libido. Even a moment’s thought unveils the greed and self-centeredness behind lust, for example. In the gray town characters, we see Hell imagined in its true colors. Clarence Dye explains Lewis’s notion aptly: “His concept of hell is the total alienation of man from God, nature and his fellow man. And this is dramatically portrayed by this image of hell, . . . as individuals frantically trying not to be neighbors.”24 Since Hell is the place where human potential is dried up—a place filled with remains of what were once humans but are now mere shells or ghosts, if you like—it is the last place to seek companionship. Sprinkled throughout Lewis’s work, we find characters that typify the constriction into self and sin that is Hell. In Perelandra the possessed Weston, so unlike a human that he is called the Unman, descends to unspeakably childish banality, endlessly

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calling Ransom’s name, responding to each reply with “Nothing.” From That Hideous Strength, the very names of Wither and Frost belie their lost humanity. When there is intelligence, it is always warped and in the service of evil, doing someone in. For these early deconstructionists, even language becomes a tool for confusing and manipulating, not communication and truth. It is all politics and savage abuses of power with this lot. To end up in Hell with these and with Screwtape, Jadis the White Witch, Rishda, and Shift would be to enter a nightmare without the hope of waking. Jean-Paul Sartre in his play Huis Clos is closer to the truth than G. B. Shaw when he says, “Hell is other people.”25 But actually Hell is much worse than even the company of the damned suggests. It is having no company at all. It is, as Harry Blamires suggests, “the self, the confined, invulnerable, incommunicable, inescapable self.”26 Satan gives us the supreme example of created potential shriveling into boredom. He was the archangel Lucifer, second only to God before his own fall. Lewis analyzes his constriction in his study of Milton’s Paradise Lost and contrasts him with the newly created Adam: Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace “all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.” Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. It may be said that Adam’s situation made it easier for him, than for Satan, to let his mind roam. But that is just the point. Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament. Certainly, he has no choice. He has chosen to have no choice. He has wished to “be himself,” and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom. . . . Satan wants to go on being Satan. That is the real meaning of his choice “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.”27

God could not be just or good without punishing evil, if we take punishment to mean in any way exclusion from Heaven. If he allowed people with evil bents to run free in his kingdom, then Heaven itself would cease to be good.28 Because evil descends to the banal and self-centered, Hell is monotonous. In Heaven, where each person forever grows into the distinct personality God designed for unique and everexpanding roles, Heaven is the place with all the interesting personalities. To explore the mind of our creator, who knows the history and future path of the electrons at the furthest reach of the cosmos and numbers the particles of plankton strained through the baleens of every whale, and guides the flight of every comet—that will be interesting company.

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But the damned repeatedly refuse the invitation to Reality and to meet face to face the One the Solid People call “Eternal Fact” and “Love Himself.” To think Hell and its occupants interesting requires the same absurd logic that sees sin as satisfying. It’s the glimmer of fool’s gold. Like Napoleon, all in Hell have become the sin they have chosen, unillumined by the common grace of God liberally dispensed on the earth, but absent in Hell. Nothing is more boring than the tawdry and unrelieved self. What a deception we are under when we fear that Heaven will be boring, when all along it is Hell we should fear. In Lewis’s Great Divorce, we see that Hell is a boring place peopled with bores. It should not surprise us that there are no pleasures in Hell. Remember Screwtape’s lament that the research and development arm of Hell never succeeded in inventing a pleasure. Besides, Hell only uses pleasure to entrap, then steadily reduces the enjoyment while increasing the desire. We call such ill-gotten pleasures vices. But when pleasure is taken God’s way, the enjoyment sweetens the memory and brings us closer to him. Hell is the absence of God, and God is the author of all the pleasures, as the Bible claims and as Augustine, Dante, Milton, and Lewis illustrate at length. As we will see in the “Ascent into Heaven” section, the signal contribution of this book is to make us feel as well as think that Heaven is the one real place in the universe and, by comparison, earth a Shadowland. What, then, is Hell? It is the ultimate unreality of being “so nearly nothing.”29 Hell exists, but everything there is the debris from what was human (or spirit in the angels’ case) with the potential for true reality and fulfillment in Heaven squandered. The problem in depicting Heaven and Hell is one we have already considered: creating something believable when their glories or horrors are so beyond our human experience. What happens when we die? The spirit leaves the body. We think in our one-dimensional, time-bound existence of the resurrection as some time in the future. So when we think of this departed spirit, we imagine ghosts rising like steam. It’s just the way our imaginations work, devoid as they are of a sense of category for spirit. What Lewis does to make our imaginations better fit reality is turn the widespread but mistaken idea about spirit around: in The Great Divorce the people from Hell are ghosts; the people from Heaven are solid. Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield observed that, paradoxically, “Lewis employs not only material shapes but materiality itself to symbolize immateriality.”30 The hellians appear in Heaven as greasy smoke and smudgy stains on the air. The narrator remarks: “One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane.”31 As mentioned earlier, when the folk from Hell step on the grass in even the hinterlands of Heaven, it pierces their feet like spikes. Even the grass is more real than they. By contrast, the grass bends normally beneath the feet of the solid people from Heaven. When the narrator, freshly

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from Hell himself, gets the bright idea that the water will be solid to him like the unbending grass and that he could therefore walk on it, he gets swept off his feet and bumps along on top of the swiftly moving stream, badly bruising his ghostly body. And the spray from a waterfall goes through him like a bullet. When the narrator asks his heavenly guide, MacDonald, why the people in Heaven don’t go down to Hell to try to salvage the hellians, he learns that they can’t because those in Heaven are so large and substantial. The bus from Hell had entered Heaven through some tiny crack in the soil. He is told that if a butterfly from Heaven were to swallow all of Hell, it would make no more difference to the butterfly than swallowing a single atom. The hellians are ghosts because they are blown up from their nothingness to the size of the solid people in Heaven. From Hell’s perspective, Hell looked vast, though empty. By contrast, Heaven is so spacious that it seems to exist in a different dimension. The narrator remarks, it “made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair.”32 If we stop to think a minute, we can see why the spirit must be more real. God is spirit. God created the cosmos, the whole physical universe. God is not trapped in His own creation. He is bigger than what He made. Like the heavenly butterfly in The Great Divorce, if God were to swallow the whole universe, the effect would be no more than our swallowing an atom. Or if the whole thing were to suddenly collapse upon itself and evaporate into nothing, God would be no less than He is now, and He could make it all over again, if He wished. That is, in fact, what will happen at the resurrection: the present Heaven and earth will pass away, and He will make a new Heaven and a new earth. Spirit is more real and more powerful than flesh. Even in the case of our own persons, we see that it is our spirits that animate our bodies. When the spirit leaves, the flesh rots. The spirit will remain to reanimate our imperishable, heavenly bodies. As the characters from Hell exit the bus on the outskirts of Heaven they are met by someone they knew on earth who has come out of Deep Heaven to invite them in. All but one returns to Hell for the very reason they went in the first place. It will be instructive to look at a few cases. Lewis’s journey motif with its setting in Hell and Heaven makes possible some very effective puns that throw common phrases into a new light. The first Ghost into Heaven to get extended treatment is simply called “The Big Man” in Hell and “The Big Ghost” in Heaven. He is met from Heaven by Len, a man who had worked for him and who had murdered a mutual acquaintance named Jack. Upon seeing that Len is a Solid Person and robed in heavenly splendor, the first words out of the Big Ghost’s mouth are, “Well, I’m damned.”33 He spoke as he always had on earth, blaspheming to show his surprise, but now it is

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literally true, which one look at the solid Len confirms by contrast with his ghostly self. Len explains that the burden of seeing himself as a murderer had driven him to Christ. The Big Ghost merely persists in claiming the unfairness of it all; considering himself a decent chap, he keeps demanding his “rights.” Ironically, the Big Ghost and all in Hell have precisely that: their rights. All have sinned; all deserve Hell. As Len urges him to forget about himself and his rights, the Ghost, saying more than he knows, insists, “‘I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.’”34 In Britain, “bleeding” in this usage is a profane oath referring to Christ’s blood spilled on the cross, which is literally the Big Ghost’s only hope of Heaven. Len replies, “‘Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.’”35 Language usage has come full circle from concrete heavenly truth to profane abstraction back to literal heavenly truth. We laugh, we see with new insight, we blush, and we hopefully repent. Meanwhile, The Big Ghost, stubborn as a mule about accepting any Heaven that admits murderers like Len, concludes, “‘I’d rather be damned than go along with you. I came here to get my rights, see? Not to go sniveling along on charity tied onto your apron strings. If they’re too fine to have me without you, I’ll go home.’”36 So he goes “home” to Hell. Another character who prefers Hell is the Episcopal priest who is met by a former colleague. And let us not smugly think that Lewis’s target in this satirical portrait is the clergy only. What he says applies to anyone who tries to substitute mere religion for the reality of a personal and vital relationship with the living God. The priest is greatly interested in religion and religious questions. To his chagrin, he discovers that no one in Heaven is the least bit interested in his speculations. They don’t need his theology because they all have God Himself. The Episcopal ghost prefers questions to answers, questing to arriving, talking about God, and to meeting Him face to face. He has made his choice. In the end, learning that his kind of theology isn’t needed in Heaven, he hurries back to Hell and a little Theological Society there to give a paper on “growing up to the measure of the stature of Christ.” The theme that runs through each of the meetings between the solid people of Heaven and the ghosts of Hell is choice. As we have seen in so many instances, sin is ultimately the choosing of self over God. Damnation and Hell are receiving that choice of self over God forever. The priest’s interests were not really in theology, but in the fact that the views were his. Later on MacDonald, quoting Milton, explains: “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is

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always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends.”37 ASCENT INTO HEAVEN Lewis has another good reason for allowing the trip from Hell to Heaven: to provide multiple contrasts as a way of highlighting both hellish and heavenly qualities, contrasts between physical things like landscapes and bodies, and contrasts in the character of the people. Upon arriving at Heaven, the first thing the narrator notices is its expansiveness. Though Hell seemed vast from within, by contrast to Heaven, it is claustrophobic. Heaven “made the Solar System itself an indoor affair.”38 We later learn that the hellians, though it seemed to them a long journey up the side of a cliff, emerged in Heaven from a miniscule crack in the soil between two blades of grass. If a butterfly of Heaven were to swallow all of Hell, the teacher MacDonald tells the narrator, it would make no more difference than swallowing a single atom.39 How real is Heaven, how much more substantial? Hell could not contain the minutest part of it. After the landscape, the next thing the narrator notices is the bodies of the hellians. They appear as ghosts, as dirty stains on the air. Because people in Hell are really remains of their human selves with the potential shriveled by sin, when they are expanded to the size of a normal person in Heaven, they are so thin and unsubstantial that they look like ghosts. This is a very effective technique for showing that Heaven is ultimate reality and Hell so nearly nothing. But the most telling contrast comes in the character of the people. The diabolical and warped are met by the holy and whole. Those from Heaven are fulfilled, content, overflowing with love and the reflected glory of Christ, which makes them luminous. The Ghosts have all come to Heaven for some bogus and selfish reason. The Solid People, as those from Heaven are called, have all made great sacrifices to come long distances from Deep Heaven to the outskirts in hopes of winning some of the Ghosts to Heaven. The longest journey, however, is made by Christ Himself. We know from some key, though subtle, clues that the bus driver who brings the Ghosts to Heaven is a representative of Christ. First, the narrator’s teacher, MacDonald, says that only the greatest can become small enough to fit into Hell. Second, the driver is described as being “full of light.” Third, He is rejected by those He came to save: “God! I’d like to give him one in the ear-’ole,” snarls one of the Ghosts. The narrator responds: “I could see nothing in the countenance of the Driver to justify all this, unless it were that he had a look of authority and

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seemed intent on carrying out his job.”40 This episode is a literal enactment of the Apostles’ Creed: “He descended into Hell.” Having seen the long parade of Ghosts who come to the outskirts of Heaven only to return to Hell for the same reason they went there in the first place, the narrator naturally inquires of his guide whether any actually accept the invitation to enter Heaven. There are allusions by MacDonald to many who make it in, but we only see one actually making the passage. This is the case of a man whose besetting sin is lust, symbolized by a red lizard who sits on his shoulder, reminding him that his very identity is wrapped up in his lust and that life would be insipid without the flame of desire. An angel meets the Lustful Ghost and implores him for permission to kill the lizard. Through many struggles and though fearful that it may mean his death, he gives permission. Wondrously, the lizard is transformed into a white stallion, which the now Solid man rides joyously into Heaven. The point is not that people once in Hell can go to Heaven or that sin can progress to goodness: Lewis explicitly denies both, as we have seen. The point is (1) that we must die to self in order to truly live, and (2) that all desires, however masked, are ultimately intended for Heaven. When we give our desires to God, the Author of all the pleasures, He fulfills the desires. The very thing that when grasped would drag us to Hell and pervert our personalities, when given to God is not only fulfilled but becomes a means of grace. God created all things good. Sin is not self-existent; it is a perversion of good. A word on the Solid People: none in the book who come from Heaven are “great” in an earthly sense. The only one besides Lewis with a popular earthly reputation is his guide MacDonald. The others are all ordinary people with sins running the gambit from pride in one’s own talent, to apostasy, and to murder. The main difference is that the Solid people all recognized their need of God and repented; they turned from their sin and received the gift of a new heart (new motives) and eternal life. None suffers the illusion that he or she deserves Heaven. It is a completely undeserved gift. The Solid people urge each of the Ghosts to receive the gift and “enter into joy.” Pride keeps them out. All try to justify their sin. One of the impressions we are left with is how easy Heaven is to gain, and how easy it is to lose. The last paired Ghost and Solid person are treated at the greatest length and deserve special attention. Here, using the technique of analogy (using the earthly to describe the heavenly), we have Lewis’s fullest description of a Solid Person. Throughout the book, Lewis has used the technique of distancing. Scripture says, “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.”41 Since Heaven is beyond our experience or even our imagining, Lewis avoids error and enhances our anticipation of it by never giving us a glimpse of “Deep Heaven” or even

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“Deep Hell.” Throughout the narrative, we are always in the in-between time before night falls in Hell or the day dawns in Heaven. Geographically, we are also never allowed into Hell or Heaven proper; we are always on the outskirts. Yet what we see of the fringes is both unspeakably horrific and unspeakably enchanting by comparison to earth. Even here on the outskirts, we see enough to make our blood run fast. In the last pairing, a self-pitying Ghost named Frank appears as a Dwarf leading by a chain a projection of himself called a Tragedian. He is met by Sarah Smith of Golders Green, who was his wife on earth. Frank’s interest in making the pilgrimage from Hell is not in gaining Heaven; it is for gaining pity for his condition, thereby holding the joy of Heaven hostage. In this Lewis answers the age-old question of how there could be joy in Heaven when even one soul suffers the torments of everlasting Hell. Pity cannot hold love hostage. MacDonald, the narrator’s guide, explains to him that Heaven will not make a dunghill of “the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.”42 In the end, the Dwarf Frank chooses his self-pity over Heaven and shrinks until nothing is left but the projection of his sin, the Tragedian, which vanishes back to the constriction that is Hell. Sarah is not brokenhearted; it is not possible in the presence of Him who is true love and joy. She is joined by angels who sing a psalm of her overcoming joy and protection by God. She appears by earthly standards to be a goddess. Indeed, she is a “Great One” in Heaven, though on earth she was the lady next door. She is reaping the rewards of nameless acts of love that characterized every contact with every person and all creation. This love extended even to the animals. Now, in Heaven, these very animals make up a part of her sizable entourage, which also included gigantic emerald angels scattering flowers, followed by numerous boys and girls, and musicians. Of the indescribably beautiful music, the narrator can only say that no one who “read that score would ever grow sick or old.”43 “Dancing light” shined from the entourage. All was in honor of Sarah Smith, who was so gloriously ordinary on earth. And to this the Self-Pitying ghost and all from Hell were invited. We wonder at the depth of pride and perversion that would embolden so many, both in the book and in our own experience, to thumb their noses at the sublime largesse of God. The Great Divorce ends with dizzying reflections on Time and Eternity, Predestination, and Free Will. Lewis deftly shows that all attempts to solve this ancient paradox fail if they are posed from within time. God being outside of time, sees all in an everpresent now, so from His point of view, all is known and done, even what is yet in the future for us. But from our point of view within time, choices are still before us. Even now, in what may be my twentieth reading of The Great Divorce, the concluding pages move me to tears for people without the hope of the Heaven and my own destiny were

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it not for “Bleeding Charity.” Throughout the book, it has been perpetual evening twilight in the Grey Town of Hell and perpetual presunrise dawn in the hinterlands of Heaven where the meetings take place. Now at the end, as the pilgrim narrator looks into the face of his teacher, George MacDonald, and with the east at his back, the promised sunrise breaks. It will mean eternal day for Heaven and a darkening to eternal night for Hell. The sunlight falls in solid blocks upon the narrator’s insubstantial body, and he is stricken with terror, for he has come to these precincts of Heaven as a ghost from Hell: “‘The morning! The morning!’ I cried, ‘I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.’ ”44 In the moment he is seized by the terror of damnation, the narrator awakens from his dream, clutching at a tablecloth and pulling down on his head, not blocks of light, but books. With sweet relief, we realize that he and we are still pilgrims and Heaven still before us. There is yet time to choose and to guide the choice of others.

INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION While anything approaching precision about a great book’s influence is difficult at best, some observations rooted in fact may at least be suggestive. In surveying some the popular books on faith and Heaven from my own shelves, I find that the following books (all published between 1995 and 2006) explicitly cite The Great Divorce: Randy Alcorn’s Heaven, Anthony DeStefano’s, A Travel Guide to Heaven, John Eldredge’s The Scared Romance, Hank Hanegraaff’s Resurrection, Max Lucado’s When Christ Comes, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Faith, and Joni Eareckson Tada’s Heaven. In addition, Harry Blamires, a prolific critic and former pupil of C. S. Lewis at Oxford, has written New Town (2005), a book clearly modeled on The Great Divorce.45 My search of the MLA (Modern Language Association) online bibliography yielded twenty listings, thirteen of them from 1990 to the present: Ten periodicals devoted to Lewis studies five in Mythlore, one in a scholarly Christian journal, and four in mainstream literary journals. One indication of the respect accorded The Great Divorce is the list of classic writers discussed in these publications, including: Dante, Augustine, Blake, Eliot, and Baudelaire. The themes include: epic, redemption, free will, feminism, time and consciousness, medieval dream vision, law, and immortality. Religion indexes list fewer works, but include articles from The Harvard Theological Review and the Journal of Bible and Religion. The online bookseller Amazon provides a popular and easily accessible indicator of sales. On March 29, 2006, out of all the books sold on Amazon, The Great Divorce ranked an impressive 926, with a cumulative ranking of 1783. Lewis’s most popular book, Mere Christianity, ranked 304 for the day

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and 414 cumulatively—The Screwtape Letters is close behind Mere Christianity, and all three are ahead of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, no doubt because so many are already in circulation. By comparison, the most popular edition of the classic The Pilgrim’s Progress ranks 6,389 for the day and 7,505 cumulatively, and Milton’s Paradise Lost 5,032 and 8,888. These are impressive numbers and show that Lewis’s books as a whole have wide appeal, with The Great Divorce toward the top of that list. Perhaps one of the best indicators of influence is foreign translations, since these represent considerable work and investment, while showing something of both the staying power and worldwide reach a book commands. The Lewis collection at Wheaton College’s Wade Center has translations of The Great Divorce in the following ten languages: Spanish, French, German, Bulgarian, Russian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Finnish, and Czech. The influence of The Great Divorce is steady and growing, as Lewis’s reputation and value is becoming increasingly established in general. It will likely remain in print and well read, but will also not likely supplant those Lewis titles that have become almost household items. Some suggest that its appeal is hampered by the want of a plot and character development, which may indeed give us a clue to the book’s limitations. From somewhere in the back of my mind, however, I hear a voice saying, “but it didn’t keep The Screwtape Letters from becoming and remaining enormously popular.” On the other hand, this narrator is not as colorful a character as Screwtape, whose words are laced with trenchant irony and whose mask both we and Wormwood begin to penetrate from the very beginning. In the case of the unnamed narrator of The Great Divorce, we identify with him, but neither love nor hate him—or, as with Screwtape, love to hate him. But in place of a colorful narrator, we get a succession of deftly drawn and varied pairings of people from Heaven and Hell. And while The Great Divorce may not have quite the humor of The Screwtape Letters, what both books do have in common is a satirical touch, an episodic structure, brevity, psychological penetration, theological range, and an imaginative reach. In the case of the last item, I would even give The Great Divorce the edge. It deals with a subject few have contributed to meaningfully. Lewis adds to our knowledge by breaking stereotypes, dramatizing the urgency of choice, and making our eternal destinies imaginable. Because these achievements are so rare, I believe that Lewis’s slim volume will continue to wear well through the waxing and waning of theological and literary fashion. NOTES 1. Though expanded here, the core of this essay appears in my book Beyond the Shadowlands: C. S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005) and is used with the permission of the publisher.

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2. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hopper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, revised edn. (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 281. 3. George MacDonald, George MacDonald: 365 Readings, ed. C. S. Lewis (New York: Collier, 1947), 35, 88. 4. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 280. Cf. 1 Peter 2:11 and Philippians 3:20. 5. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), xviii. For an excellent but brief scholarly treatment of linkage between The Great Divorce and Blake and Dante, see Dominic Manganiello, “The Great Divorce: C. S. Lewis’s Reply to Blake’s Dante,” Christian Scholar’s Review 17(4) (Summer 1998), 475–489. 6. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Preface, 6. 7. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 145. 8. I have coined the term “hellian” as a convenient way of referring to someone from Hell, avoiding the common spelling “hellion” because it connotes an outward rowdiness. 9. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 28. 10. C. S. Lewis, “Christianity and Culture.” In Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 33. 11. Evan K. Gibson, C. S. Lewis, Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 116. 12. Ibid., 112. 13. Milton, Paradise Lost I, 254–255. 14. Milton, Paradise Lost IV, 75. 15. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 9:75. 16. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 125. 17. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Edited by Walter Hooper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 8. 18. See Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955) 19. Ecclesiastes 3:11. 20. Ibid., 9:72–73. 21. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 128. 22. Ibid., 10, 145. 23. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 2, 20. 24. Clarence F. Dye, “The Evolving Eschaton in C. S. Lewis” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, New York, 1973), 219. 25. Harry Blamires, Knowing the Truth about Heaven and Hell: Our Choices and Where They Lead Us (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1988), 149–150. 26. Ibid., 150. 27. C. S. Lewis, Preface to “Paradise Lost,” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 13, 102–103. 28. Kenneth Kantzer, “Afraid of Heaven,” Christianity Today 35(6) (27 May, 1991), 38.

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29. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 75. 30. Owen Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 88. 31. Ibid., 3, 27. 32. Ibid., 3, 27. 33. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 4, 32. 34. Ibid., 4, 34. 35. Ibid. There is some controversy over the etymology “bloody” as a slang term. 36. Ibid., 4, 36. 37. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 9, 69–70. 38. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 3, 27. 39. Ibid., 122–123. 40. Ibid., 14. 41. I Corinthians 2:9 42. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 13, 121. 43. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 12, 107. 44. Ibid., 14, 128. 45. Harry Blamires, New Town (Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2005).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barfield, Owen. Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Blamires, Harry. Knowing the Truth About Heaven and Hell: Our Choices and Where They Lead Us. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1988. ———. New Town. Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2005. Dye, Clarence F. “The Evolving Eschaton in C. S. Lewis.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, New York, 1973. Gibson, Evan K. C. S. Lewis, Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980. Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Revised edition. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis Companion & Guide. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1996. Lewis, C. S. “Preface to “Paradise Lost.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. ———. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan, 1962. ———. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1955. ———. “The Weight of Glory.” In The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Edited with Introduction by Walter Hooper. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 25–42. ———. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Edited with Introduction by Walter Hooper. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

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MacDonald, George. George MacDonald: 365 Readings. Edited by C. S. Lewis. New York: Collier, 1947. Manganiello, Dominic. “The Great Divorce: C. S. Lewis’s Reply to Blake’s Dante.” Christian Scholar’s Review 27(4) (Summer 1998): 475–489. Milton, John. The Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SELECTED BOOKS WITH CHAPTERS, SECTIONS, OR ARTICLES ON THE GREAT DIVORCE Adey, Lionel. C. S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. Duriez, Colin. The C. S. Lewis Encyclopedia. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000. Gibson, Evan K. C. S. Lewis, Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His Fiction. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980. Glover, Donald E. C. S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981. Hannay, Margaret Patterson. C. S. Lewis. New York: Ungar, 1981. Hein, Rolland. Christian Mythmakers. Chicago, IL: Cornerstone, 1998. Honda, Mineko. The Imaginative World of C. S. Lewis. New York: University Press of America, 2000. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis Companion & Guide. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1996. Kilby, Clyde. The Christian World of C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964. ———. Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1978. Knowles, Sebastian D. C. A Purgatorial Flame: Seven British Writers in the Second World War. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Manlove, Colin. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Patterning of a Fantastic World. New York: Twayne, 1993. Martindale, Wayne. Beyond the Shadowlands: C. S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005. Payne, Leanne. Real Presence. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book Houses, 1995. Peters, Thomas C. Simply C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1997. Schultz, Jeffrey D. and John G. West, Jr. Editors. The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. Walsh, Chad. The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

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Miracles: C. S. Lewis’s Critique of Naturalism Victor Reppert

After the famous Liar, Lunatic, or Lord trilemma, the second most-discussed apologetic argument advanced by C. S. Lewis must be the argument against naturalism found in the third chapter of his book Miracles: A Preliminary Study, commonly known as the argument from reason. This is, I suppose, largely my fault, since I wrote a book, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason,1 dedicated to the discussion and defense of that argument. The argument was the subject of Lewis’s famous exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe,2 which resulted in Lewis developing a revised version of the argument. Besides my own efforts, the argument has been defended by more recent philosophers such as William Hasker,3 Richard Purtill,4 and Angus Menuge.5 What is more, perhaps the best-known Anglo-American philosopher of religion, Alvin Plantinga,6 has developed a line of argument that bears a family resemblance to the argument Lewis defended. The argument has, however, had its critics. Not only Anscombe, but also Antony Flew7 and John Beversluis8 have criticized Lewis’s version of it; Jim Lippard,9 Keith Parsons,10 Theodore Drange,11 and Richard Carrier12 have criticized my efforts; and Plantinga’s argument has attracted a whole host of philosophical opponents.13 In this essay, I will begin by discussing the role Lewis’s argument plays in the context of his book on miracles. I will then proceed to discuss the argument’s antecedents, particularly its place in the apologetic writings of the

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British prime minister and philosopher Arthur Balfour.14 I will then present the argument of Lewis’s first edition, explain Anscombe’s criticisms, and then present the argument as it appears in the revised edition of Miracles. I will attempt to show that it is not the case, as Beversluis maintains, that Anscombe’s objections can be pressed further, and that Lewis’s revised argument does nothing to meet them.15 Rather, the argument, in my judgment does successfully survive Anscombe’s objections. After that I will discuss some recent versions of the argument, both mine and those of others, and will then also discuss some objections that have been put to it by recent writers.

THE ARGUMENT FROM REASON AND ITS PLACE IN LEWIS’S MIRACLES Lewis was first and foremost a Christian apologist, and not merely a theistic apologist. What this means is that Lewis does not typically follow the “classical” model of apologetics in which it is deemed necessary first to prove the existence of God and then to prove the truth of various Christian doctrines. Lewis’s Miracles was written in response to a request by Dorothy Sayers, who wrote and told him that there were no good books on the subject. Lewis called the book Miracles: A Preliminary Study, and this immediately raises the question “preliminary to what?” That answer is, preliminary to the study of biblical scholarship. An innocent Christian (or non-Christian) might pick up a book on biblical scholarship and assume that the scholarship there presented reflects the state of the evidence for and against a particular miracle claim found in Scripture. What he or she may not be aware of, however, is that the evidence for or against a miracle claim is typically assessed against the backdrop of some presuppositions on the part of the scholar concerning the antecedent likelihood of the miraculous. Some scholars and historians begin their investigations of Scripture with presuppositions that rule out accepting any miracle story as literally true. Rudolph Bultmann, an enormously influential German biblical scholar with whose works Lewis was familiar, wrote: It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world.16

Similarly, earlier this year, in a debate about the Resurrection of Jesus with William Lane Craig, the eminent biblical scholar Bart Ehrman maintained:

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What are miracles? Miracles are not impossible. I won’t say they’re impossible. You might think they are impossible and, if you do think so, then you’re going to agree with my argument even more than I’m going to agree with my argument. I’m just going to say that miracles are so highly improbable that they’re the least possible occurrence in any given instance. They violate the way nature naturally works. They are so highly improbable, their probability is infinitesimally remote, that we call them miracles. No one on the face of this Earth can walk on lukewarm water. What are the chances that one of us could do it? Well, none of us can, so let’s say the chances are one in ten billion. Well, suppose somebody can. Well, given the chances are one in ten billion, but, in fact, none of us can. What about the resurrection of Jesus? I’m not saying it didn’t happen; but if it did happen, it would be a miracle. The resurrection claims are claims that not only that Jesus’ body came back alive; it came back alive never to die again. That’s a violation of what naturally happens, every day, time after time, millions of times a year. What are the chances of that happening? Well, it’d be a miracle. In other words, it’d be so highly improbable that we can’t account for it by natural means. A theologian may claim that it’s true, and to argue with the theologian we’d have to argue on theological grounds because there are no historical grounds to argue on.17

Biblical scholars who follow the lead of Bultmann or Ehrman begin their investigations with the presupposition that any story about what happened in biblical times that contains no miracle is better than a story about those same events that involves God’s miraculous intervention. This view was given its classic expression in David Hume’s famous “Of Miracles,” section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.18 The casual reader might think a scholar such as Bultmann or Ehrman has discovered that a nonmiraculous account of, say, the events surrounding the first Easter, is preferable to a miraculous account, when in fact these scholars feel obligated to presuppose, going into their investigations, that miraculous explanations must be avoided. Bringing such presuppositions to the study of Scripture, in Lewis’s view, threatened the very essence of Christianity. The Apostle Paul said “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” and “we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 19). Thinking clearly and consistently about miracles is critical to understanding the issues surrounding Christianity. Lewis maintained that unlike religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, the miraculous element in Christianity is absolutely critical. “Demythologized” understandings of Christianity, for Lewis, drained Christianity of its content. People like Bultmann and Ehrman, who study the founding events of Christianity with a deliberate disregard for the miraculous element, use a principle of methodological naturalism when investigating biblical texts; that is, in the investigation of those texts only natural processes should be considered, and nothing that would involve the supernatural. What they maintain,

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essentially, is that, at least for the purpose of investigating historical events, they are obligated to view the physical world as if it were causally closed. Lewis begins his book on miracles by pointing out that one cannot simply look at the evidence to determine whether some miracle or other has occurred; one must consider the antecedent probability of the miraculous before deciding this. One decision that a person has to make is whether or not one believes that there is anything other than nature, and if so, whether that undermines the causal closure of the physical world. As he puts it: Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence “according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry.” But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are. If they are impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then only mathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us; since history never provides that degree of evidence for any event, history can never convince us that a miracle has occurred. If, on the other hand, miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidence will not be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of miracles have occurred. The result of our historical enquiries thus depends on the philosophical views with which we have been holding before we even began to look at the evidence. The philosophical question must come first.19

To provide an illustration for Lewis’s claim, in a debate entitled “Why I am/am not a Christian” between William Lane Craig and Keith Parsons, atheist Keith Parsons challenged the Resurrection of Jesus by appealing to Carl Sagan’s maxim “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”20 If Sagan’s maxim has to be applied to the Resurrection, then the case for it will be very difficult to defend. If we reject or modify Sagan’s maxim, then a case for the Resurrection might very well be defensible. But Lewis is not merely concerned about biblical scholars who are cardcarrying methodological or metaphysical naturalists. He is also concerned about the after effects of naturalism on biblical scholars who are not naturalists of either stripe. He writes: It comes partly from what we may call a “hangover.” We all have naturalism in our bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system. Its assumptions rush back upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed.21

The Argument from Reason is significant not merely as an argument for theism, but also as an argument against the causal closure of the physical. If we have reason to reject the causal closure of the physical in the case of rational inference, this will make it easier to reject the requirement that accounts of the founding of Christianity reject the causal closure of the physical.

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THE CONCEPT OF NATURALISM Exactly what does Lewis mean by naturalism? Very often the terms Naturalism and Materialism are used interchangeably, but at other times it is insisted that the two terms have different meanings. Lewis says, What the naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thing you can’t go behind, is a vast process of time and space which is going on of its own accord. Inside that total system every event (such as your sitting reading this book) happens because some other event has happened; in the long run, because the Total Event is happening. Each particular thing (such as this page) is what it is because other things are what they are; and so, eventually, because the whole system is what it is.22

As a presentation of naturalism, however, this might be regarded as inadequate by contemporary naturalists, because it saddles the naturalist with a deterministic position. The mainstream position in contemporary physics involves an indeterminism at the quantum-mechanical level. Lewis himself thought that this kind of indeterminism was really a break with naturalism, admitting the existence of a lawless Subnature as opposed to Nature, but most naturalists today are prepared to accept quantum-mechanical indeterminism as a part of physics and do not see it as a threat to naturalism as they understand it. Some critics of Lewis have suggested that his somewhat deficient understanding of naturalism undermines his argument.23 Lewis, however, insisted on “making no argument” out of quantum mechanics and expressed a healthy skepticism about making too much of particular developments in science that might be helpful to the cause of apologetics.24 However, contemporary defenders of the Argument from Reason such as William Hasker and myself have developed accounts of materialism and naturalism that are neutral as to whether or not physics is deterministic or not. Whatever Lewis might have said about quantum-mechanical indeterminacy, the problems he poses for naturalism arise whether determinism at the quantum-mechanical level is true or not. Materialism, as we understand it, is committed to three fundamental theses: 1) The basic elements of the material or physical universe function blindly, without purpose. Man is the product, says Bertrand Russell, of forces that had no prevision of the end they were achieving. Richard Dawkins’s exposition and defense of the naturalistic worldview is called The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a World Without Design25 not because no one ever designs anything in a naturalistic world, but because, explanations in terms of design must be reduced out in the final analysis. Explanation always proceeds bottom-up, not top-down. 2) The physical order is causally closed. There is nothing transcendent to the physical universe that exercises any causal influence on it.

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3) Whatever does not occur on the physical level supervenes on the physical. Given the state of the physical, there is only one way the other levels can be.26

The argument from reason is concerned with what philosophers today call prepositional attitudes, states such as believing that proposition p is true, desiring that proposition p be true, doubting that proposition p be true, etc, and how these prepositional attitudes come to be caused. There are three types of materialism, at least so far as propositional states are concerned. One type is called eliminative materialism, which argues that propositional attitudes like belief and desire do not exist. Another kind is called reductive materialism, according to which mental states can be analyzed or reduced in physical terms. A third kind is nonreductive materialism, according to which mental states are not to be analyzed in physical terms, but given the state of the physical, there is only one way the mental can be. All of these positions are consistent with the definition of materialism given above. As for naturalism, it is hard to see how a worldview could be naturalistic without satisfying the above definition. Perhaps a world could be naturalistic if there was no matter or if the science describing the most basic level of analysis is not physics. However, whatever objections there might be to materialism based on the argument from reason would also be objections to these forms of naturalism. So although the argument is primarily directed at materialism, so far as I can tell, there is no form of naturalism that fares any better against the argument from reason than materialism. ANTECEDENTS OF LEWIS’S ARGUMENT FROM REASON Although Lewis seemed never to address his apologetical books primarily to atheists (as opposed to others who might reject Christianity), he did present an argument against the atheistic naturalism, and it is an argument designed to show that the physical is not causally closed. He describes coming to reject a naturalistic worldview in his book Surprised by Joy, under the influence of his Anthroposophist friend Owen Barfield. He wrote: [He] convinced me that the positions we had hitherto held left no room for any satisfactory theory of knowledge. We had been, in the technical sense of the term, “realists”; that is, we accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed to the senses. But at the same time, we continued to make for certain phenomena claims that went with a theistic or idealistic view. We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, that our moral judgment was “valid” and our aesthetic experience was not just pleasing but “valuable.” The view was, I think, common at the time; it runs though Bridges’ Testament of Beauty and Lord Russell’s “Worship of a Free Man.” Barfield convinced me that it was inconsistent.

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If thought were merely a subjective event, these claims for it would have to be abandoned. If we kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the sense, aided by instruments co-ordinated to form “science” then one would have to go further and accept a Behaviorist view of logic, ethics and aesthetics. But such a view was, and is, unbelievable to me.27

Now Lewis, when he accepted this argument, did not become a traditional theist but rather an Absolute Idealist, a worldview that does not leave room for the miraculous. In Surprised by Joy Lewis gives independent reasons for rejecting Absolute Idealism, and in Miracles Lewis also devotes chapter 11, “Christianity and ‘Religion’,” to criticizing pantheistic worldviews, including Absolute Idealism. The Argument from Reason did not originate with Lewis. Something like it can be traced all the way back to Plato, and Augustine had an argument connected reason with our appropriation of the knowledge of eternal and necessary truths. Descartes maintained that the higher rational processes of human beings could not be accounted for in materialistic terms, and while Kant denied that these considerations did not provide adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, he did think they were sufficient to rule out any materialist account of the mind. However, naturalism or materialism as a force in Western thought did not become really viable until 1859, when Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species. The earliest post-Darwinian presentation of the Argument from Reason that I am familiar with, and one that bears a lot of similarities to Lewis’s argument, is found in Prime Minister Arthur Balfour’s The Foundations of Belief. Lewis never mentions The Foundations of Belief in his writings, but he does say in one place that Balfour’s subsequent book Theism and Humanism is “a book too little read.” According to Balfour the following claims follow from the “naturalistic creed.” 1. My beliefs, in so far as they are the result of reasoning at all, are founded on premises produced in the last resort by the “collision of atoms.” 2. Atoms, having no prejudices in favour of the truth, are as likely to turn out wrong premises as right ones; nay, more likely, inasmuch as truth is single and error manifold. 3. My premises, therefore, in the first place, and my conclusions in the second, are certainly untrustworthy, and probably false. Their falsity, moreover, is a kind which cannot be remedied; since any attempt to correct it must start from premises not suffering under the same defect. But no such premises exist. 4. Therefore, my opinion about the original causes which produced my premises, as it is an inference from them, partakes of their weakness; so that I cannot either securely doubt my own certainties or be certain about my own doubts.28

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Balfour then considers a “Darwinian rebuttal,” which claims that natural selection acting as a “kind of cosmic Inquisition,” will repress any lapses from the standard of naturalistic orthodoxy. The point was made years later by Antony Flew as follows: [A]ll other things being equal and in the long run and with many dramatic exceptions, true beliefs about our environment tend to have some survival value. So it looks as if evolutionary biology and human history could provide some reasons for saying that it need not be a mere coincidence if a significant proportion of men’s beliefs about their environment are in fact true. Simply because if that were not so they could not have survived long in that environment. As an analysis of the meaning of “truth” the pragmatist idea that a true belief is one which is somehow advantageous to have will not do at all. Yet there is at least some contingent and non-coincidental connection between true beliefs, on the one hand, and the advantage, if it be an advantage, of survival, on the other.29

However, Balfour offers this reply to the evolutionary argument: But what an utterly inadequate basis for speculation we have here! We are to suppose that powers which were evolved in primitive man and his animal progenitors in order that they might kill with success and marry in security, are on that account fitted to explore the secrets of the universe. We are to suppose that the fundamental beliefs on which these powers of reasoning are to be exercised reflect with sufficient precision remote aspects of reality, though they were produced in the main by physiological processes which date from a stage of development when the only curiosities which had to be satisfied were those of fear and those of hunger.30

Interestingly, Balfour’s argument here finds surprising support from Darwin himself. In a letter to William Graham Down, Darwin wrote: the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?31

As can be seen, Balfour’s presentation of the argument, and his consideration of counterarguments, anticipated much of the debate on this issue that is still going on a century after his book was written. THE ARGUMENT OF THE FIRST EDITION In the first edition of Miracles, Lewis presents the version of the argument from reason that Anscombe criticized. We can formalize it as follows: 1. No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes. 2. If naturalism is true then all beliefs can be explained in terms of irrational causes.

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3. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no thought is valid. 4. If no thought is valid, then the thought, “materialism is true,” is not valid. 5. Therefore, if materialism is true, then the belief “materialism is true” is not valid. 6. A thesis whose truth entails the invalidity of the belief that it is true ought to be rejected, and its denial ought to be accepted. 7. Therefore, naturalism ought to be rejected, and its denial accepted.

This is the argument that drew the criticisms of Roman Catholic philosopher and Wittgenstein student, Elizabeth Anscombe. This critique is significant because of the way in which it forced Lewis to develop and refine his arguments. Too much attention has been paid to the putative psychological effects of this controversy, and conclusions concerning Lewis’s success as a Christian apologist have been drawn on the basis of his supposed emotional reaction to Anscombe’s challenge. Very often this is done without regard to the content of this exchange, and often this is done by people who show by their discussion to have no real understanding of the relevant philosophical issues. Such a procedure, as Bertrand Russell once said of a thesis in the philosophy of mathematics, has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. ANSCOMBE’S FIRST OBJECTION: IRRATIONAL VERSUS NONRATIONAL Is it correct for Lewis to talk about physically caused events as having irrational causes? Irrational beliefs, one would think, are beliefs that are formed in ways that conflict with reason: wishful thinking, for example, or through the use of fallacious arguments. On the other hand, when we speak of a thought having a nonrational cause, we need not be thinking that there is any conflict with reason.32 While this claim seems correct, it hardly puts an end to the argument from Reason. The problem arises when we consider what a naturalist typically believes. Let’s take the theory of evolution as an example. Naturalists are always big on evolution, since invariably they must assign to the evolution process the task of producing the incredibly complex features, say, of the human eye. Traditionally, the existence of the human eye was thought to be so efficient and complex that it had to be the handiwork of God. After all, the artificial replacement of vision by modern medicine is still the stuff of science fiction. Nevertheless, the naturalist is undaunted; she is persuaded that it is all the result of natural selection. However, a naturalist does not merely need to believe that we are the product of evolution through random variation and

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natural selection, she also has to believe that there was a process of scientific inference that led Charles Darwin to reach his conclusions about natural selection and how it works. Naturalism really does require the existence of rational inferences in order to be legitimate. Now a rational inference is a rational process. A valid or sound argument is an argument on paper in which the premises are true and the conclusion follows logically and inevitably from the premises and therefore must also be true. A rational inference, however, is not just a paper argument; it is an act of knowing on the part of a person that recognizes the content of the premises, accepts the premises as true, perceives the logical relationship between the premises, and concludes that the conclusion must be true as well. In short, naturalists must believe not merely that their own beliefs were not produced by irrational causes, they must maintain that the conclusion that evolution is true was produced, in the mind of Charles Darwin and in their own mind, as the result of a rational process. Otherwise there would be no reason to prefer the deliverances of the natural sciences to a blind acceptance of the Book of Genesis as a way of forming one’s beliefs concerning the origin of species. For that reason, it is possible to restate Lewis’s argument in such a way that it does not make reference to irrational causes, and indeed in Lewis’s revised chapter the phrase “irrational causes” does not appear. 1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes. 2. If naturalism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes. 3. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no belief is rationally inferred. 4. If any thesis entails the conclusion that no belief is rationally inferred, then it should be accepted and its denial accepted. 5. Therefore, naturalism should be rejected and its denial accepted.

ANSCOMBE’S SECOND OBJECTION: PARADIGM CASES AND SKEPTICAL THREATS Anscombe also objected to the idea Lewis argued that, were naturalism true, then reasoning would not be valid. She asks, “What can you mean by valid beyond what would be indicated by the explanation you give for distinguishing between valid and invalid reasoning, and what in the naturalistic hypothesis prevents the explanation from being given or meaning what it does.”33 This is a Paradigm Case argument, and the point is this: We can ask whether this particular argument is a good one, but does it really make sense to argue that

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reasoning might itself be invalid? Anscombe maintains that since the argument that some particular piece of reasoning is invalid involves contrasting it with some other kinds of reasoning that are valid, the question “Could reasoning really be valid?” is really a nonsense question. One way of using the argument from reason would be to use it as a skeptical threat argument. The idea is that if naturalism is true we will be unable to refute skeptical arguments against reasoning in general. The problem here is that it is far from clear that anyone, naturalist or not, can refute skepticism about reasoning, nor is it considered any great merit for any metaphysical theory that it would be possible to refute this kind of thoroughgoing skepticism. And, if we need to refute skepticism in order to accept some worldview, then it is not at all clear that theism will do that either. If we use our theistic beliefs to defend the basic principles of reasoning, then we would have to formulate that into an argument and then presuppose our ordinary canons of logical evaluation in the presentation of that very argument, thereby begging the question. Rather, one can, it seems to me, present the argument from reason as a best explanation argument. One should assume, at least to begin with, that human beings do reach true conclusions by reasoning, and then try to show, given the fact that people do reach true conclusions by reasoning, that this is best explained in terms of a theistic metaphysics as opposed to a naturalistic metaphysics. Now if we present the argument in this way, and then an opponent comes along and says “I see that your argument presupposes that we have beliefs. I don’t think we do, so your argument fails,” then we can reply to him by saying that if there are no beliefs then you don’t believe what you’re saying. Consequently the status of your own remarks as assertions is called into question by your own thesis that there are no beliefs, and that this is going to end up having a devastating effect on the very sciences on which you base your arguments. Presenting the argument in this way, it seems to me, gets around the problems based on the Paradigm Case argument. ANSCOMBE’S THIRD OBJECTION: THE AMBIGUITY OF “WHY,” “BECAUSE,” AND “EXPLANATION” The third and main Anscombe objection to Lewis’s argument is that he fails to distinguish between different senses of the terms “why,” “because,” and “explanation.” There are, she suggests, four explanation types that have to be distinguished: 1. Naturalistic causal explanations, typically subsuming the event in question under some physical law.

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2. Logical explanation, showing the logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion. 3. Psychological explanations, explaining why a person believes as he/she does. 4. Personal history explanations, explaining how, as a matter of someone’s personal history, they came to hold a belief.

She suggests that arguments of different types can be compatible with one another. Thus a naturalistic causal explanation might be a complete answer to one type of question with respect to how someone’s belief came to be what it was, but that explanation might be compatible with an explanation of a different type.34 Now what is interesting is that Lewis, in reformulating his own argument, not only draws the distinctions on which Anscombe had insisted—he actually makes these distinctions the centerpiece of his revised argument. He makes a distinction between Cause and Effect relations on the one hand, and Groundand-Consequent relations on the other. Cause and effect relations say how a thought was produced, but ground-and-consequent relations indicate how thoughts are related to one another logically. However, in order to allow for rational inference, there must be a combination of ground-consequent and cause-effect relationships that, Lewis says, can’t exist if the world is as the naturalist says that it is. Claiming that a thought has been rationally inferred is a claim about how that thought was caused. Any face-saving account of how we come to hold beliefs by rational inference must maintain that “One thought can cause another thought not by being, but by being, a ground for it.”35 However, there are a number of features of thoughts as they occur in rational inference that set them apart from other beliefs. Acts of thinking are no doubt events, but they are special sorts of events. They are “about” other things and can be true or false. Events in general are not “about” anything and cannot be true or false . . . Hence acts of inference can, and must be considered in two different lights. On the one hand they are subjective events in somebody’s psychological history. On the other hand, they are insights into, or knowings of, something other than themselves.36

So here we already have three features of acts of thinking as they occur in rational inference. First, these thoughts have to be about something else, and second, they can be true or false. Second, their propositional contents must cause other thoughts to take place. But there is more: What from the first point of view is a psychological transition from thought A to thought B, at some particular moment in some particular mind is, from the thinker’s

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point of view a perception of an implication (if A, then B). When we are adopting the psychological point of view we may use the past tense, “B followed A in my thoughts.” But when we assert the implication we always use the present—“B follows from A.” If it ever “follows from” in the logical sense it does so always. And we cannot reject the second point of view as a subjective illusion without discrediting human knowledge.37

So now, in addition to the three features of thoughts as they occur in rational inference, we can add a fourth, that is, that the act of inference must be subsumed under a logical law. And the logical law according to which one thought follows another thought is true always. It is not local to any particular place or time; indeed laws of logic obtain in all possible worlds. Lewis then argues that an act of knowing “is determined, in a sense, by what is known; we must know it to be thus because it is thus.”38 P’s being true somehow brings it about that we hold the belief that p is true. Ringing in my ears is a basis for knowing if it is caused by a ringing object; it is not knowledge if it is caused by a tinnitus. Anything that professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what it knows, is really a theory that there is no reasoning. But this, as it seems, is what Naturalism is bound to do. It offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behaviour, but this account, on inspection, leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.39

UNLIMITED EXPLANATORY COMPATIBILITY AND THE NONCAUSAL VIEW OF REASON This is a point at which Anscombe, in her brief response to Lewis’s revised argument objects, claimed that Lewis did not examine the concept of “full explanation” that he was using. Anscombe had expounded a “question relative” conception of what a “full explanation” is; a full explanation gives a person everything they want to know about something. John Beversluis explicates this idea as follows, using the string quartets of Beethoven as his example: Fully means “exhaustively” only from a particular point of view. Hence the psychologist who claims to have fully explicated the quartets from a psychological point of view is not open to the charge of self-contradiction if he announces his plans to attend a musicologist’s lecture on them. In music, as in psychology, the presence of nonrational causes does not preclude reasons. In fact, there is no limit to the number of explanations, both rational and non-rational, that can be given why Beethoven composed his string quartets . . . All of these “fully explicate” the composition of his string quartets. But they are not mutually exclusive. They are not even in competition.40

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This is an explication of the idea of an unlimited explanatory compatibilism. It is further supported if one accepts, as Anscombe did when she wrote her original response to Lewis, the Wittgensteinian doctrine that reasonsexplanations are not causal explanations at all. They are rather what sincere responses that are elicited from a person when he is asked what his reasons are. As Anscombe puts it: It appears to me that if a man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and they genuinely are his reasons, for thinking something—then his thought is rational, whatever causal statements can be made about him.41

Keith Parsons adopted essentially the same position in response to my version of the argument from reason when he wrote: My own (internalist) view is that if I can adduce reasons sufficient for the conclusion Q, then my belief that Q is rational. The causal history of the mental states of being aware of Q and the justifying grounds strike me was quite irrelevant. Whether those mental states are caused by other mental states, or caused by other physical states, or just pop into existence uncaused, the grounds still justify the claim.42

But the claim that reasons-explanations are not causal explanations at all seems to me to be completely implausible. As Lewis puts it, Even if grounds do exist, what have they got to do with the actual occurrence of belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretched back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence and how could the existence of grounds promote it?43

If you were to meet a person, call him Steve, who could argue with great cogency for every position he held, you might on that account be inclined to consider him a very rational person. But suppose that on all disputed questions Steve rolled dice to fix his positions permanently and then used his reasoning abilities only to generate the best available arguments for those beliefs selected in the above-mentioned random method. I think that such a discovery would prompt you to withdraw from him the honorific title “rational.” Clearly the question of whether a person is rational cannot be answered in a manner that leaves entirely out of account the question of how his or her beliefs are produced and sustained. As for the question of explanatory compatibility, the issues related to the question of whether one causal explanation can exclude one another or whether they can be compatible is rather complex. But in the case of the string quartets of Beethoven, surely the example is a flawed one, because what

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is being discussed here is different aspects of the composition. The urge to compose them requires a different explanation from the decisions Beethoven made about what melody to compose, how to put the harmony together, and so on. If Beethoven was obsessed with writing for string instruments, we still do not know why he chose quartets as opposed to, say, cello solos. Second, it seems clear that there have to be some limits on explanatory compatibility. Consider how we explain how presents appear under the Christmas tree. If we accept the explanation that, in spite of the tags on the presents that say Santa Claus, the presents were in fact put there by Mom and Dad, this would of course conflict with the explanation in terms of the activity of Santa Claus. An explanation of disease in terms of microorganisms is incompatible with an explanation in terms of a voodoo curse. In fact, naturalists are the first to say, “We have no need of that hypothesis” if a naturalistic explanation can be given where a supernatural explanation had previously been accepted. Further, explanations, causal or noncausal, involve ontological commitments. What plays an explanatory role is supposed to exist. So if we explain the existence of the presents under the Christmas tree in terms of Santa Claus I take it that means that Santa Claus exists in more than just a nonrealist “Yes, Virginia,” sense. Even the most nonreductivist forms of materialism maintain that there can be only one kind of causation in a physical world, and that is physical causation. It is not enough simply to point out that we can give different “full” explanations for the same event. Of course they can. But given the causal closure thesis of naturalism there cannot be causal explanations that require nonmaterialist ontological commitments. The question that is still open is whether the kinds of mental explanations required for rational inference are compatible with the limitations placed on causal explanations by naturalism. If not, then we are forced to choose between saying that there are no rational inferences and accepting naturalism. But naturalism is invariably presented as the logical conclusion of a rational argument. Therefore the choice will have to be to reject naturalism. Lewis maintains that if we acquired the capability for rational inference in a naturalistic world it would have to have arisen either through the process of evolution or as a result of experience. However, he says that evolution will always select for improved responses to the environment, and evolution could do this without actually providing us with inferential knowledge. In addition, while experience might cause us to expect one event to follow another, to logically deduce that we should expect one effect to follow another is not something that could be given in experience.

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THREE ARGUMENTS FROM REASON In my book, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, I distinguished necessary conditions of rational inference, which I maintained cause problems for naturalism, and which I maintain are better handled on theistic assumptions as opposed to naturalistic assumptions. These include intentionality or aboutness, truth, mental causation in virtue of propositional content, the psychological relevance of logical laws, the existence of an enduring person throughout the process of rational inference, and the reliability of our rational faculties. So instead of one Argument from Reason, I concluded that there are really six. The first four I have argued have been alluded to in the course of my discussion of Lewis’s Miracles. The last one has been developed by Plantinga and is the centerpiece of his argument against naturalism, but was also prefigured in his predecessor Balfour. I want to discuss three of the arguments here: the argument from intentionality, the argument from mental causation in virtue of content, and the argument from the psychological relevance of logical laws. In doing so I will consider and respond to the objections of Richard Carrier.44 THE ARGUMENT FROM INTENTIONALITY One of them is the claim that our thoughts are about other things. Philosophers today refer to this “aboutness” as intentionality. In my book I develop an “argument from intentionality,” according to which we have good reason to reject a naturalistic worldview because naturalism cannot account for the fact that our thoughts are about other things. Physical states have physical characteristics, but how can it be a characteristic of, say, some physical state of my brain, that it is about dogs Boots and Frisky, or about my late Uncle Stanley, or even about the number 2. Can’t we describe my brain, and its activities, without having any clue as to what my thoughts are about? To consider this question, let us give a more detailed account of what intentionality is. Angus Menuge offers the following definition: 1. The representations are about something. 2. They characterize the thing in a certain way. 3. What they are about need not exist. 4. Where reference succeeds, the content may be false. 5. The content defines an intensional context in which the substitution of equivalents typically fails.45

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So, if I believe that Boots and Frisky are in the backyard, this belief has to be about those dogs; I must have some characterization of those dogs in mind that identifies them for me; my thoughts can be about them even if, unbeknownst to me, they have just died; my reference to those two dogs can succeed even if they have found their way into the house; and someone can believe that Boots and Frisky are in the backyard without believing that “the Repperts’ 13-year-old beagle” and “the Repperts’ 8-year-old mutt” are in the back yard. It is important to draw a further distinction, a distinction between original intentionality, which is intrinsic to the person possessing the intentional state, and derived or borrowed intentionality, which is found in maps, words, or computers. Maps, for example, have the meaning that they have, not in themselves, but in relation to other things that possess original intentionality, such as human persons. There can be no question that physical systems possess derived intentionality. But if they possess derived intentionality in virtue of other things that may or may not be physical systems, this does not really solve the materialist’s problem. The problem facing a physicalist account of intentionality is presented very forcefully by John Searle: Any attempt to reduce intentionality to something nonmental will always fail because it leaves out intentionality. Suppose for example that you had a perfect causal account of the belief that water is wet. This account is given by stating the set of causal relations in which a system stands to water and to wetness and these relations are entirely specified without any mental component. The problem is obvious: a system could have all those relations and still not believe that water is wet. This is just an extension of the Chinese Room argument, but the moral it points to is general: You cannot reduce intentional content (or pains, or “qualia”) to something else, because if you did they would be something else, and it is not something else.46

Admittedly, this is merely an assertion of something that needs to be brought out with further analysis. It seems to me that intentionality, as I understand it, requires consciousness. There are systems that behave in ways such that, in order to predict their behavior, it behooves us to act as if they were intentional systems. If I am playing chess against a computer, and I am trying to figure out what to expect it to play, then I am probably going to look for the moves I think are good and expect the computer to play those. I act as if the computer were conscious, even though I know that it has no more consciousness than a tin can. Similarly, we can look at bee dances and describe them in intentional terms; the motions the bees engage in enable the other bees to go where the pollen is, but it does not seem plausible to attribute a conscious awareness of what information is being sent in the course

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of the bee dance. We can look at the bees as if they were consciously giving one another information, but the intentionality is as-if intentionality, not the kind of original intentionality we find in conscious agents. As Colin McGinn writes: I doubt that the self-same kind of content possessed by a conscious perceptual experience, say, could be possessed independently of consciousness; such content seems essentially conscious, shot through with subjectivity. This is because of the Janus-faced character of conscious content: it involves presence to the subject, and hence a subjective point of view. Remove the inward-looking face and you remove something integral—what the world seems like to the subject.47

If we ask what the content of a word is, the content of that word must be the content for some conscious agent; how that conscious agent understands the word. There may be other concepts of content, but those concepts, it seems to me, are parasitical on the concept of content that I use in referring to states of mind found in a conscious agent. Put another way, my paradigm for understanding these concepts is my life as a conscious agent. If we make these words refer to something that occurs without consciousness, it seems that we are using the byway of analogy with their use in connection with our conscious life. The intentionality that I am immediately familiar with is my own intentional states. That’s the only template, the only paradigm I have. I wouldn’t say that animals are not conscious, and if I found good evidence that animals could reason it would not undermine my argument, since I’ve never been a materialist about animals to begin with. Creatures other than myself could have intentional states, and no doubt do have them, if the evidence suggests that what it is like to be in the intentional state they are in is similar to what it is like to be in the intentional state that I am in. Richard Carrier wrote a rather lengthy critique of my book. But in his response to the argument from intentionality, we find him repeatedly using terms that make sense to me from the point of view of my life as a conscious subject. However, I am not at all sure what to make of them when we start thinking of them as elements in the life of something that is not conscious. His main definition of “aboutness” is this: Cognitive science has established that the brain is a computer that constructs and runs virtual models. All conscious states of mind consist of or connect with one or more virtual models. The relation these virtual models have to the world is that of corresponding or not corresponding to actual systems in the world. Intentionality is an assignment (verbal or attentional) of a relation between the virtual models and the (hypothesized) real systems. Assignment of relation is a decision (conscious or not), and such decisions, as well as virtual models and actual systems, and patterns

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of correspondence between them, all can and do exist on naturalism, yet these four things are all that are needed for Proposition 1 to be true.48

Or consider the following: Returning to my earlier definition of aboutness, as long as we can know that “element A of model B is hypothesized to correspond to real item C in the universe” we have intentionality, we have a thought that is about a thing.49

Or: Because the verbal link that alone completely establishes aboutness—the fact of being “hypothesized”—is something that many purely mechanical computers do.50

Or again: Language is a tool—it is a convention invented by humans. Reality does not tell us what a word means. We decide what aspects of reality a word will refer to. Emphasis here: we decide. We create the meaning for words however we want. The universe has nothing to do with it—except in the trivial sense that we (as computational machines) are a part of the universe.51

Now simply consider the words, hypothesize and decide that he uses in these passages. I think I know what it means to decide something as a conscious agent. I am aware of choice 1 and choice 2, I deliberate about it, and then consciously choose 1 as opposed to 2, or vice versa. All of this requires that I be a conscious agent who knows what my thoughts are about. That is why I have been rather puzzled by Carrier’s explaining intentionality in terms like these; such terms mean something to me only if we know what our thoughts are about. The same thing goes for hypothesizing. I can form a hypothesis (such as, all the houses in this subdivision were built by the same builder) just in case I know what the terms of the hypothesis mean, in other words, only if I already possess intentionality. That is what these terms mean to me, and unless I’m really confused, this is what those terms mean to most people. Again, we have to take a look at the idea of a model. What is a model? A model is something that is supposed to resemble something else. But if we explain “X is about Y” at least partially in terms of “X is a model for Y,” I really don’t think we’ve gotten anywhere. How can X be a model for Y if it isn’t about Y in the first place. Nevertheless we may be able to work though the critique and find how he proposes to naturalize the concepts. Material state A is about material state B just in case “this system contains a pattern corresponding to a pattern in that system, in such a way that computations performed on this system are believed to match and predict behavior in that system.”52

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In correspondence with me Carrier said this: As I explain in my critique, science already has a good explanation on hand for attentionality (how our brain focuses attention on one object over others). Combine that with a belief (a sensation of motivational confidence) that the object B that we have our attention on will behave as our model A predicts it will, and we have every element of intentionality.53

But I am afraid I don’t see that this naturalization works. My objection to this is that in order for confidence to play the role it needs to play in Carrier’s account of intentionality that confidence has to be a confidence that I have an accurate map, but confidence that P is true is a propositional attitude, which presupposes intentionality. In other words, Carrier is trying to bake an intentional cake with physical yeast and flour. But when the ingredients are examined closely, we find that some intentional ingredients have been smuggled in through the back door. Here is another illustration: The fact that one thought is about another thought (or thing) reduces to this (summarizing what I have argued several times above already): (a) there is a physical pattern in our brain of synaptic connections physically binding together every datum about the object of thought (let’s say, Madell’s “Uncle George”), (b) including a whole array of sensory memories, desires, emotions, other thoughts, and so on, (c) which our brain has calculated (by various computational strategies) are relevant to (they describe or relate to) that object (Uncle George), (d) which of course means a hypothesized object (we will never really know directly that there even is an Uncle George: we only hypothesize his existence based on an analysis, conscious and subconscious, of a large array of data), and (e) when our cerebral cortex detects this physical pattern as obtaining between two pieces of data (like the synaptic region that identifies Uncle George’s face and that which generates our evidentially based hypothesis that the entity with that face lives down the street), we “feel” the connection as an “aboutness” (just as when certain photons hit our eyes and electrical signals are sent to our brain we “feel” the impact as a “greenness”).54

Now did you notice the word “about” in step A of Carrier’s account of intentionality? If there is something in the brain that binds together everything about Uncle George, and that is supposed to explain how my thought can be about Uncle George, then it seems pretty clear to me that we are explaining intentionality in terms of intentionality. What I think the deepest problem is in assigning intentionality to physical systems is that when we do that norms of rationality are applied when we determine what intentional states exist, but normative truths are not entailed by physical facts. In the realm of ethics, add up all the physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and sociological facts about a murder for hire, and

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nothing in that description will entail that it was a wrongful act. Similarly, scientific information about what is will not tell you what an agent ought to believe, but we need to know what an agent ought to believe in order to figure out what he or she does believe. According to John Searle: So far no attempt at naturalizing content has produced an explanation (analysis, reduction) of intentional content that is even remotely plausible. . . . A symptom that something is radically wrong with the project is that intentional notions are inherently normative. They set standards of truth, rationality, consistency, etc., and there is no way that these standards can be intrinsic to a system consisting entirely of brute, blind, nonintentional causal relations. There is no mean component to billiard ball causation. Darwinian biological attempts at naturalizing content try to avoid this problem by appealing to what they suppose is the inherently teleological [i.e., purposeful], normative character of biological evolution. But this is a very deep mistake. There is nothing normative or teleological about Darwinian evolution. Indeed, Darwin’s major contribution was precisely to remove purpose, and teleology from evolution, and substitute for it purely natural forms of selection.55

So any attempt to naturalize intentionality will end up bringing intentionality in through the back door, just as Carrier’s account does. When you encounter a new or unfamiliar attempt to account for intentionality naturalistically, look it over very carefully, and you should be able to find out where the bodies are buried. Other naturalists have been more modest in the way in which they reconcile intentionality and naturalism. They maintain that intentional states may not be reducible to physical states, as Carrier appears to be arguing, but they do think that these states are supervenient upon physical states. They very often agree that there is a mystery as to how intentional states can exist in a physicalistic universe. This is certainly a possibility for the naturalist, but it runs the risk, as we shall see, of making propositional states epiphenomenal, that is, causally irrelevant. This will be a serious problem for the naturalist, since a naturalist presupposes the existence of mental causation when they argue on behalf of naturalism. THE PROBLEM OF MENTAL CAUSATION My next argument is the Argument from Mental Causation. If naturalism is true, even if there are propositional states like beliefs, then these states have to be epiphenomenal, without a causal role. Now careful reflection on rational inference, if we think about it, commits us to the idea that one mental event causes another mental event in virtue of its propositional content.

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Now if events are caused in accordance with physical law, they cause one another in virtue of being a particular type of event. A ball breaks a window in virtue of being the weight, density, and shape that it is in relation to the physical structure of the window. Even if it is the baseball that Luis Gonzalez hit against Mariano Rivera that won the 2001 World Series, its being that ball has nothing to do with whether or not it can break the window now. So let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, causes the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts. If anything not in space and time makes these thoughts the thoughts that they are, and if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur by virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions. Only that property of the brain can be relevant to what the brain does, according to a naturalistic account of causation. What this means is that those forms of substance materialism that accept property dualism invariably render the “mental” properties epiphenomenal. If the physical properties are sufficient to produce the physical effect, then the mental properties are irrelevant unless they are really physical properties “writ large,” so to speak. And mental states that are epiphenomenal cannot really participate in rational inference. Carrier’s account of mental causation clearly presupposes a reductive, rather than a nonreductive materialism. He writes: Every meaningful proposition is the content or output of a virtual model (or rather: actual propositions, of actual models; potential propositions, of potential models). Propositions are formulated in a language as an aid to computation, but when they are not formulated, they merely define the content of a nonlinguistic computation of a virtual model. In either case, a brain computes degrees of confidence in any given proposition, by running its corresponding virtual model and comparing it and its output with observational data, or the output of other computations. Thus, when I say I “accept” Proposition A this means that my brain computes a high level of confidence that Virtual Model A corresponds to a system in the real world (or another system in our own or another’s brain, as the case may be); while if I “reject” A, then I have a high level of confidence that A does not so correspond; but if I “suspend judgment,” then I have a low level of confidence either way. By simply defining “proposition” as

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I have here, Proposition 3 follows necessarily from Propositions 1 and 2. Therefore naturalism can account for this as well.56

But I see a serious problem with this whole concept. In order for the content of the mental state to be relevant to the production of a rational inference, it seems to me that everyone who believes that Socrates is mortal would have to be in the same type of brain state as everyone else who believes that Socrates is mortal. Is this plausible? But more than that, here again we find Carrier explaining one kind of mental activity in terms of another mental activity and then explaining it “naturalistically” by saying “the brain” does it. My argument is, first and foremost that something exists whose activities are to be fundamentally explained in intentional and teleological terms. Whether we call it a brain, a part of the brain, a soul, a banana, or a bowling ball is not essential to my argument; if the fundamental explanations are intentional, then I have established all that I am trying to establish. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RELEVANCE OF LOGICAL LAWS My next argument concerns the role of logical laws in mental causation. In order for mental causation to be what we ordinarily suppose it to be, it is not only necessary that mental states be causally efficacious by virtue of their content, it is also necessary that the laws of logic be relevant to the production of the conclusion. That is, if we conclude “Socrates is mortal” from “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man,” then not only must we understand the meanings of those expressions, and these meanings must play a central role in the performance of these inferences, but what Lewis called the ground-and-consequent relationship between the propositions must also play a central role in these rational inferences. We must know that the argument is structured in such a way that in arguments of that form the conclusion always follows from the premises. We do not simply know something that is the case at one moment in time, but we know something that must be true in all moments of time, in every possible world. But how could a physical brain, which stands in physical relations to other objects and whose activities are determined, insofar as they are determined at all, by the laws of physics and not the laws of logic, come to know, not merely that something was true, but could not fail to be true regardless of whatever else is true in the world. We can certainly imagine, for example, a possible world in which the laws of physics are different from the way they are in the actual world. We can imagine, for example, that instead of living in a universe in which dead people

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tend to stay dead, we find them rising out of their graves on a regular basis on the third day after they are buried. But we cannot imagine a world in which, once we know which cat and which mat, it can possibly be the case that the cat is both on the mat and not on the mat. Now can we imagine there being a world in which 2 + 2 is really 5 and not 4? I think not. It is one thing to suggest that brains might be able to “track” states of affairs in the physical world. It is another thing to suggest that a physical system can be aware, not only that something is the case, but that it must be the case; and that not only it is the case but that it could not fail to be the case. Brain states stand in physical relations to the rest of the world, and are related to that world through cause and effect, responding to changes in the world around us. How can these brain states be knowings of what must be true in all possible worlds? Consider again the difficulty of going from what is to what ought to be in ethics. Many philosophers have agreed that you can pile up the physical truths, and all other descriptive truths from chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology, as high as you like about, say, the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and you could never, by any examination of these, come to the conclusion that these acts were really morally wrong (as opposed to being merely widely disapproved of and criminalized by the legal system). Even the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie argued that if there were truths of moral necessity, these truths, and our ability to know those truths, do not fit well into the naturalistic worldview, and if they existed, they would support a theistic worldview.57 Mackie could and did, of course, deny moral objectivity, but my claim is that objective logical truths present an even more serious problem for naturalism, because the naturalist cannot simply say they don’t exist on pain of undermining the very natural science on which his worldview rests. Arguing that such knowledge is trivial because it merely constitutes the “relations of ideas” and does not tell anything about the world outside our minds seems to me to be an inadequate response. If, for example, the laws of logic are about the relations of ideas, then not only are they about ideas that I have thought already, but also they are true of thoughts I haven’t even had yet. If contradictions can’t be true because this is how my ideas relate to one another, and it is a contingent fact that my ideas relate to one another in this way, then it is impossible to say that they won’t relate differently tomorrow. Carrier responds somewhat differently. He says: For logical laws are just like physical laws, because physical laws describe the way the universe works, and logical laws describe the way reason works—or, to avoid begging the question, logical laws describe the way a truth-finding machine works, in

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the very same way that the laws of aerodynamics describe the way a flying-machine works, or the laws of ballistics describe the way guns shoot their targets. The only difference between logical laws and physical laws is that the fact that physical laws describe physics and logical laws describe logic. But that is a difference both trivial and obvious.58

What this amounts to, it seems to me, is a denial of the absolute necessity of logic. If the laws of logic just tell us how truth-finding machines work, then if the world were different a truth-finding machine would work differently. I would insist on a critical distinction between the truths of mathematics, which are true regardless of whether anybody thinks them or not, and laws governing how either a person or a computer ought to perform computations. I would ask “What is it about reality that makes one set of computations correct and another set of computations incorrect?” William Vallicella provides an argument against the claim that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations: 1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for reduction). 2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently true. (By definition of “empirical generalization”: empirical generalizations record what happens to be the case, but might have not been the case.) 3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true. (From 1 and 2). 4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible that p be false. (True by definition) 5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4). 6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which p & ∼p is true. 7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Therefore 1 is false, and its contradictory, the clam that the laws of logic are not empirical generalizations, is true.59

Logic, I maintain, picks out features of reality that must exist in any possible world. We know, and have insight into these realities, and this is what permits us to think. A naturalistic view of the universe, according to which there is nothing in existence that is not in a particular time and a particular place, is hard-pressed to reconcile their theory of the world with the idea that we as humans can access not only what is, but also what must be. I conclude, therefore, that there is something deeply mysterious about a world that is at bottom material rather than mental producing beings that have intentional/prepositional mental states, in which we find mental causation in virtue of the content of the mental state, and who are aware of and employ

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the laws of logic in rational inference. However, if the Maker of the universe is a rational being, as God is supposed to be, then this becomes a good deal less mysterious. I conclude, therefore, that the argument from reason is unrefuted and constitutes a substantial reason for preferring a theistic understanding of the universe to a naturalistic one. NOTES 1. Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003). Other essays of mine on the subject include “The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19(3) (1989); “The Argument from Reason,” Philo 2 (1999), 33–45; “Reply to Parsons and Lippard,” Philo 3 (2000), 76–89; “Causal Closure, Mechanism, and Rational Inference, Philosophia Christi, 2nd. Ser., 3 (2) (2001); “Several Formulations of the Argument from Reason,” Philosophia Christi, 2nd ser., 5(1) (2003), 9–34; “Some Supernatural Reasons Why My Critics are Wrong,” Philosophia Christi, 2nd ser., 5(1) (2003); “The Argument from Reason and Hume’s Legacy,” in James Sennett and Douglas Groothuis’ In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Human Assessment (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 253–270. 2. Anscombe’s rebuttal to Lewis is found in G. E. M Anscombe, The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, 3 vols. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 224–231. A brief response to Lewis’s revision is found on pp. x–xi of the same volume. 3. William Hasker, “The Transcendental Refutation of Determinism” Southern Journal of Philosophy 11 (1973): 175–183; and “Why the Physical Isn’t Closed,” chapter 3 of The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 58–80; compare as well the chapter in this volume, “What About a Sensible Naturalism,” 53–62. 4. Richard Purtill, Reason to Believe (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 44–46. 5. Angus Menuge, “Beyond Skinnerian Creatures: A Defense of the LewisPlantinga Argument against Evolutionary Naturalism,” chapter 6 of Agents Under Fire (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 149–174. 6. Alvin Plantinga, “Is Naturalism Irrational?” chapter 12 of Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Warranted Christian Belief (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), 227–240, 281–284, 350–351; and “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts” in Naturalism Defeated: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, ed. James Beilby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 7. Antony Flew, “The Third Maxim,” The Rationalist Annual (1957), 63–66; and “Determinism and Validity Again,” The Rationalist Annual (1958), 39–51. 8. John Beversluis, “Reason,” chapter 4 of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 58–83.

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9. Jim Lippard, “Historical but Indistinguishable Differences: Some Notes on Victor Reppert’s Paper,” Philo 2(1) (1999). 10. Keith Parsons, “Further Reflections on the Argument from Reason,” Philo 3(1) (2000), and “Need Reasons be Causes? A Further Reply to Lewis’s Argument from Reason, Philosophia Christi, 2nd ser. (5), 63–75. 11. Theodore Drange, “Several Unsuccessful Formulations of the Argument from Reason,” Philosophia Christi, 2nd ser. (5), 35–52. 12. Richard Carrier, “Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason,” http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard carrier/reppert.html (accessed July 30, 2006). 13. Most of these responses are found in Naturalism Defeated: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, ed. James Beilby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 14. Arthur Balfour, The Foundations of Belief: Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology. 8th ed., revised with a new introduction and summary (New York: Longmans, 1906), 279–285. 15. Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, 73. 16. Rudolph Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. H. W. Bartsch, trans. R. H. Fuller (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 5. 17. Ehrman’s response can be found in his opening statement of the debate, found at this site: http://www.holycross.edu/departments/crec/website/resurrection-debatetranscript.pdf, 12 (accessed July 30, 2006). 18. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1902]), 109–131. 19. C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 3–4. 20. William Lane Craig and Keith Parsons, “Why I am/am not a Christian,” video recording of a debate held at a Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, on June 15, 1998. 21. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 164. 22. Ibid. 12. 23. This is emphasized in Nicholas Tattersall, “A Critique of Miracles by C. S. Lewis,” http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nicholas tattersall/miracles. html (accessed July 30, 2006). Austin Cline, “C. S. Lewis and Naturalism: Can Naturalism Explain Reason, Nature, and Morality” http://atheism.about.com/od/ cslewisnarnia/a/naturalism.htm (accessed July 30, 2006); and Ed Babinski, http:// www.edwardtbabinski.us/creationism/lewis naturalism.html (accessed July 30, 2006). 24. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 13–14. 25. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, reprinted edition, 1996).

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26. Hasker, The Emergent Self, 60–64; Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, 50–54. 27. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 208. 28. Balfour, The Foundations of Belief: Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, 285–286. 29. Antony Flew, “Determinism and Validity Again,” 46–47. 30. Balfour, The Foundations of Belief: Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, 287–288. 31. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, 226–267. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 17. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 18 39. Ibid. 40. Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, 73–74. 41. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, 229. 42. Parsons, “Further Reflections on the Argument from Reason,” 101. 43. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 16. 44. Carrier, “Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason.” 45. Menuge, Agents Under Fire, 12 46. John Searle, The Re-Discovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992), 51. 47. Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 34. 48. Carrier, “Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason,” op. cit. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. E-mail correspondence with Richard Carrier. 54. Carrier, “Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason,” op. cit. 55. Searle, John, The Re-Discovery of the Mind, 50–51. 56. Carrier, “Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason,” op. cit. 57. J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 115–118. 58. Carrier, “Critical Review of Victor Reppert’s Defense of the Argument from Reason,” op. cit.

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59. William Vallicella, “Are the Laws of Logic Empirical Generalizations?” http:// maverickphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004/08/are-laws-of-logic-empirical.html (accessed July 30, 2006). BIBLIOGRAPHY Anscombe, G. E. M. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Vol. 2 of The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, 3 vols. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Balfour, Arthur. The Foundations of Belief Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, 8th edn. New York: Longmans, 1906. Beversluis, John. C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985. Hasker, William. The Emergent Self. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Menuge, Angus. Agents Under Fire. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Reppert, Victor. C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason. Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003.

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Stealing Past the Watchful Dragons: C. S. Lewis’s Incarnational Aesthetics and Today’s Emerging Imagination Philip Harrold

Resonances of the apologetical insights of C. S. Lewis speaking to a postChristian era emerge in the most unlikely of places.1 To wit, not long ago, at a gathering in Lambeth Palace, London, an “alternative worship” service was vividly described as follows: On the first visit to a service, the main impression is visual. Screens and hanging fabrics, containing a multiplicity of colours, moving and static images continuously dominate the perceptions. There are other things: the type of music, often electronic, whose textures and range seem curiously attuned to the context of worship, smells, the postures adopted by the other worshippers, . . . As the mental picture begins to fill up with details, there is a growing appreciation that considerable technological complexity is sitting alongside simplicity and directness. The rituals—perhaps walking though patterns, tieing [sic] a knot, or having one’s hands or feet anointed—are introduced with simple, non-fussy directions. The emphasis is on allowing people to do what will help, liberate, and encourage their worship rather than on the orchestration of a great event. . . . Where something is rather obscure, its purpose is to invite further reflection, perhaps teasing the worshippers to look deeper beyond the surface meaning. . . . For many of those who stay, they have never before had an experience of Christian worship like it. It is as though they have come to a new place which they instantly recognize as home.”

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Then, as now, the Reverend Dr. Paul Roberts pleaded for a renewed appreciation of the artistic sensibility in worship, not for art’s sake alone, but as part of a “vibrant missionary engagement” with postmodern aesthetics—embracing its “richer, multi-layered, and more fluid textuality—envisioning meanings and appreciating multivalence through a variety of media.”2

Roberts presently serves Anglican parishes in Bristol, England, while cohosting “alternativeworship.org,” a self-described “gateway for anyone researching Alternative Worship and new forms of church.” A similar Webbased service is provided at Vintagechurch.org by a counterpart to Roberts on my side of the pond, Dan Kimball, pastor at Santa Cruz Bible Church in California. Accordingly, Kimball wants the aesthetics at his church “to scream out who we are and what we are about the moment people walk in the doors.”3 Neither enterprise sees itself as trendy, seeker-sensitive, or mere windowdressing. Rather, the basic conviction is that arts speak to more fundamental concerns regarding the transcendent realities of truth, goodness, and beauty. Assuming that “people who value beauty might eventually look for truth,” the arts become a tool of evangelism, a pathway to God.4 Indeed, Brian McLaren, a leading spokesperson for the Emergent Church/Conversation [EC] in the United States, believes that “image (the language of imagination) and emotion (including the emotion of wonder) are essential elements of fully human knowing, and thus we seek to integrate them in our search for this precious, wonderful, sacred gift called truth . . .”5 Otherwise, the gospel remains “flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane,” observes McLaren—with a message stuck in the small world of “Sunday School Christianity,” unable to connect with a postmodern culture that is visually inclined, aesthetically charged, and open to—if not in outright pursuit of—mystery.6 Seasoned insiders to the EC like Alan Roxburgh, a writer and theological educator in Vancouver, BC, admire such “wonderfully creative movements of bright young leaders,” while, at the same time worrying that they might cater to self-actualization, becoming “purveyors of more experiential, artsy, aesthetic forms of religious goods and services.”7 The aesthetic media may very well morph into the message, confusing style and substance—“undeniably cool,” yes, but never actually answering the question, “What is the Gospel?” Scott Bader-Sayre and Andy Crouch, authors of two important cover-page articles on the EC in The Christian Century and Christianity Today (respectively), heartily endorse the recovery of a sense of mystery and transcendence through the arts—especially for those who have given up on the “small life” and superficiality of contemporary evangelicalism. Perhaps the emerging experience—in worship gatherings as well any artistic engagement with the wider world— will also nudge today’s alienated youth to see beyond their angst, into the

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numinous, finding a spiritual place they can call home. But all this relevance, according to Bader-Sayre, will have to be “modulated” by resistance—by the counter-cultural move to “[interpret] the culture to itself ” in light of the hope conveyed in the story of Jesus Christ.8 Lauren Winner expresses the tension well when she asks, “How do you simultaneously attend to the culture and be a pocket of resistance?”9 If any of this sounds familiar, it is likely because the contemporary EC interest in artistic expression is reminiscent of the challenges and opportunities C. S. Lewis encountered as he smuggled theology into his own post-Christian world through the literary media of fantasy and myth. I see two significant areas of correspondence here. First, regarding context, Lewis was just as persuaded then as the EC is now that the church was in a “missionary situation.” Writing in 1945, he observed: “A century ago our task was to edify those who had been brought up in the Faith: our present task is chiefly to convert and instruct infidels.”10 Given the pervasive spiritual alienation of his day and, indeed, of his own early life, Lewis advised an indirect or “latent” approach to evangelism that nurtured, through the poetic and mythic imaginations, a disposition to hear (preevangelism) then believe (preapologetics) the Gospel.11 Just as Paul Roberts hopes that today’s “alternative” worship services will “tease” their participants to “look deeper” at life and its ultimate destination, Lewis hoped his fantasy writing would, at the least, awaken deep longings for transcendence. Both see reenchantment and its attendant aesthetic practices as evangelistic endeavors in a world filled with competing ideologies and narratives, or perhaps a world that has no story to tell at all.12 Secondly, there is an apparent correspondence between the missional aesthetics of Lewis and the EC in the way both understand the stealthy relationship between artistic or literary expression and apologetics. Lewis actually used the term smuggle in reference to his fictional works much the same way that EC proponents speak today of the subversive ways they are communicating the Gospel in the eclectic vernacular of postmodern culture. In a letter to Anglican nun Sister Penelope (CSMV), written in the summer of 1939, Lewis observed how “any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.” He recalled his early experience of “almost believing in the gods”—indeed, feeling something akin to “holiness”—through George MacDonald’s “fantasies for grown-ups.”13 Later in life, in a more familiar passage from his essay, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Lewis observed: I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. . . . But supposing that by casting

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all these things [Christian teachings] into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.14

Indeed, Lewis knew those “watchful dragons” quite well because he had moved in fits and starts beyond the smallness of his Sunday School Christianity into a “region of awe”—a spiritual journey of deconversion and reconversion that anticipated much of the religious autobiography we see among today’s selfdescribed postmoderns.15 Smuggling was, in effect, an act of “redemptive deconstruction,” according to Louis Markos: “Lewis dissociated the signifieds of Christian theology from their typical, uninspiring signifiers (their Sunday school associations) and attached them instead to a new set of signifiers with the power to reinvigorate and inspire young and old alike.”16 He accomplished this through bold use of allegory, myth, and symbol—genres and literary devices that are most amenable to an incarnational aesthetic, the “transposing” of divine presence or, at least, transcendent meaning into a “lower” medium of communication.17 Little wonder that emergent writers like Charlie Peacock, Brian McLaren, and the late Mike Yaconelli admire Lewis for his “imaginative and mystical sensitivities,” especially his literary “portals,” which lead the reader beyond the confines of the self and the stifling pragmatism of contemporary evangelicalism into a world of “dangerous wonder.”18 There remains, however, a crucial, yet often overlooked, social aspect in Lewis’s incarnational aesthetic—an aspect I term the sympathetic imagination. Because this horizontal dimension directly challenges the persistent individualism of late-modernity it seems particularly relevant to the EC’s aesthetic engagement with contemporary culture. We begin with Lewis’s most explicit statement concerning the role of sympathy in the exercise of the imagination, as found in Miracles (1947). In his chapter on the Incarnation—“the Grand Miracle”—he explains how God becoming man is replicated “in a very minor key” throughout all of nature by the sympathetic relations humans enjoy with each other and even with animals: What we can understand, if the Christian doctrine [Incarnation] is true, is that our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be, but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation itself—the same theme in a very minor key. We can understand that if God so descends into a human spirit, and human spirit so descends into Nature, and our thoughts into our senses and passions, and if adult minds (but only the best of them) can descend into sympathy with children, and men into sympathy with beasts, then everything hangs together and the total reality, both Natural and Supernatural, in which we are living is more multifariously and subtly harmonious than we had suspected. We catch sight of a new key principle—the

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power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less.19

An awareness of these “transpositions”—especially through an exercise of the poetic imagination—means that we must not “overlook the rich sources of relevant imagery and association” available through our deepest apprehensions.20 At this point, Lewis is most interested in developing the incarnational principles of recapitulation and vicariousness as they intimate the Grand Miracle, but he also acknowledges their profound social and moral implications. In marked contrast with the natural human tendency of self-sufficiency, he emphasizes how identification with and sacrificing for others, and receiving their selfless offerings in return, is a way of disclosing, albeit imperfectly (or “faintly”), a fundamental attribute and activity of the Divine Life in the world. “Self-sufficiency, living on one’s own resources, is a thing impossible” here, because “[e]verything is indebted to everything else, sacrificed to everything else, dependent on everything else.”21 In this way, our everyday world begins to take on new meaning and significance: Thus, as we accept this doctrine of the higher world we make new discoveries about the lower world. It is from that hill that we first really understand the landscape of this valley. Here, at last, we find (as we do not find either in the Nature-religions or in the religions that deny Nature) a real illumination: Nature is being lit up by a light from beyond Nature. Someone is speaking who knows more about her than can be known from inside her.22

Lewis had long been interested in what Thomas L. Martin calls “possibleworlds semantics.” The artistic imagination was never just about the way things were, but the way things might be, or even should be. When the reader, for instance, encounters a literary world that seems strangely beyond her own time or place, she finds in the language—in the combination of words, especially metaphors—as well as the stories and their interactions an alternative reality. The text has an ontology all its own that not only enables her to move beyond the this-worldly limitations of language and literary form, but the provincialisms of the self as well. To read on is to accept the other world on its own terms.23 J. R. R. Tolkien’s appeal to the power of myth and the subcreating role of the writer are well-known sources of inspiration for this literary quality in Lewis, but we should also credit his close friend, Owen Barfield, with a deep appreciation of “imaginative vision” and its moral dimensions. In the unpublished letters exchanged during their so-called “Great War” debate, Barfield had encouraged Lewis’s growing appreciation of the “felt change of consciousness” brought about by poetic imagination.24

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While never able to embrace Barfield’s subjective idealism outright, Lewis did recognize the imagination’s capacity to awaken a sense of “universal empathy” and a “growing wholeness” marked by sympathetic and reciprocal relations between living things—a vision that combined the aesthetic and mystical, as well as cognitive and moral dimensions of consciousness. During his (re-) conversion to theism, Lewis speculated that the most significant outcome of this poetic insight was “an enriched and corrected will” guided by the “universal good” as manifested in moral intuition.25 Lewis’s restrained acceptance of this amalgam of thought-feeling-awareness was based in part on an important distinction made by idealist philosopher, Samuel Alexander, between enjoyment (or desire) and contemplation. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis noted how incompatible the emotions of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire associated with an object were with the contemplation of these “inner activities” themselves. For example, “You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.” In this way, Lewis observed, “All introspection is in one respect misleading” because it actually shuts down the passage of hope, longing, desire, etc. by deflecting our attention away from the object.26 With regard to Joy, in particular, he learned not to long for it as an “aesthetic experience,” but instead to hear Joy proclaim, “You want—I myself am your want of— something other, outside, not your nor any state of you.” As we read on in Lewis’s autobiography, we see how Joy became the “Who” that he desired— the God with whom he could find “personal relation.” Even at this critical stage, however, Lewis recognized the wider reunifying implications of this spiritual longing: In so far as we really are at all (which isn’t saying much) we have, so to speak, a root in the Absolute, which is the utter reality. And that is why we experience Joy: we yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called “we.”

Realizing that the object of this yearning was a Who and not a What brought Lewis into “the region of awe”—with its “road right out of the self,” its “commerce” with, and submission to, the numinous, its disturbing ability to remind us of our “fragmentary and phantasmal nature.”27 Eventually, as we shall see, this region became an intersubjective arena as well—one conspicuously marked by sympathetic relations. In the midst of his intense philosophical exchange with Barfield, Lewis’s Oxford brand of idealism—combining Kant’s moral imperative with classical moral philosophy and an emerging theism—was also modulated by

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Coleridge’s theory of the creative imagination. This was an important development for Lewis because it was his growing interest in the imagination that enabled him to eventually see Christianity as a solution to some nagging concerns: the relationship between desire and the metaphysical reality of natural law, and, more generally, between the perceiving subject and the perceived object.28 Instead of an unreachable and unknowable Absolute, Lewis saw how natural law reflected the Divine will and grounded the moral life of humanity. Lewis felt he could actually participate in this life with a degree of concreteness and resolve that had heretofore evaded him. But it was through an imagination attuned to sympathetic relations that he most acutely perceived its goodness, truth, and beauty.29 Barfield’s understanding of Coleridge and the poetic imagination was critical to this realization. It was as if language was able to restore to humanity the intuitive sense of “conscious participation in the world-process,” or, as Lewis came to prefer, the heavenlies.30 From a literary standpoint, this intuition operated chiefly through metaphor: “Reality, once self-evident, and therefore not conceptually experienced, but which can now only be reached by an effort of the individual mind—that is what is contained in a true poetic metaphor.”31 Based on Coleridge’s notion of the “secondary” or “esemplastic” imagination, Barfield highlighted the mind’s participation in the phenomena, enabling it to construct something that is both meaningful and felt, eliciting the reader’s sympathy toward the immanental truth conveyed in and through the literary medium. While initially reluctant to embrace the truth-bearing aspects of this romantic theory of imagination, Lewis grew to appreciate how it helped him perceive, albeit in a limited way, what the Spirit perceived, especially in terms of an “absolute relevance” that saw each object in its proper relation and context. Through poetic language, a moral sense arose in which one saw particulars in relation to wholes, disclosing truth not in themselves, but in their relations to what was outside them. This exercise of the imagination possessed moral value, elicited a moral response, and enriched, even corrected, the will. In doing so, metaphors and other tools of the imagination restored the “connective tissue,” the relationality or mutuality of things. This is what it meant to see the world that was “actually out there” more spiritually—“more really.”32 Later, in a brief, but highly suggestive discussion in the Epilogue to An Experiment in Criticism (1961), Lewis correlated this sympathetic disposition with the benefits of literary practice and experience. Chiefly among them was the capacity of the imagination to enter into the perspectives and experiences of others: Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from

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our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandize himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this.

For Lewis, the immediate “good of literature” was that it “admits us to experiences other than our own,” and, in so doing, “heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”33 Of course, this required a “baptized imagination”—one that permitted any artistic or literary endeavor, even the “sub-Christian” variety, to point upwards to God.34 But, again, note that for Lewis, this imagination had a profound horizontal dimension as well—one that began and ended in a phenomenology of sympathetic relations with others.35 Here, we find the sort of concreteness that Lewis appreciated in the “spontaneous tendency of religion” to resort to poetic expression. After all, for Lewis, it was poetic, not “ordinary” language that conveyed the presence of the object, or the other, as much as its meaning. This is what I think Lewis had in mind when he extolled the remarkable powers of great literature—the way it used “factors within our experience so that they become pointers to something outside our experience.” To what can he be referring except the arena of intersubjectivity, where love, transgression, alienation, and forgiveness all provide opportunities to “verify” fundamental Christian ideas? Forgiveness, for one, resists precise definition, but it can be communicated with uncanny specificity and emotional impact in poetic language and a wide array of other artistic forms. Ultimately, Lewis despaired that while this storehouse of “hints, similes, [and] metaphors” was crucial to late-modern apologetics, it was underappreciated, and, consequently, underutilized.36 This may not be the case today, especially considering the EC’s enthusiastic and, at times, exotic attempts at new forms of Christian worship and community. The EC, in fact, describes itself as both aesthetically driven and intensely relational.37 Writing for Emergentvillage.com, Troy Bronsink insists that “[t]he church must find a way, like Ezekiel, to imaginatively indwell the story of God’s mission through the performative nature of the arts.”38 The problem, as Paul Roberts and others inside the movement observe, is that EC aesthetics and ecclesiology are “still unformed and provisional;” they are only just beginning to recover something comparable to Lewis’s imaginative breadth and substance.39 It would be much too modern, of course, to build anything on a blueprint, let alone one blueprint (!), but the distinctive

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poesis offered by Lewis is remarkably fluid, adaptive, and missional. More importantly, it modulates the EC’s passion for relevance with a relational phenomenology of sympathetic imagination that strongly resists, as St. Anne’s did in That Hideous Strength, potent cultural pressures of competitive individuality, on the one hand, and reductive homogenization (the proverbial “lowest common denominator”), on the other. So what sort of connections, albeit tentative, exist between Lewis’s incarnational aesthetic and the recovery of the poetic imagination in today’s emergent Christian communities? Who is translating the modern Lewis into a postmodern “missionary situation,” and what, in particular, draws them, consciously or otherwise, to his peculiar mode of “redemptive deconstruction”? The emerging “conversation” is often organized into collaborative endeavors between popular practitioners, on the one hand, and theologians or, dare we say, “theorists,” on the other.40 Among the popularizers, Brian McLaren, Charlie Peacock, and Lauren Winner are particularly attentive to the “re-imagining” project. McLaren marvels at how Lewis’s fantasy literature “depends on something beyond mere rationality,” requiring imagination and vision as venues of “the mystical, where ‘consciousness is engulfed’ by something beyond itself.” Lewis represents that venerable Christian tradition of rebuking, “arrogant intellectualizing,” and its “conceptual cathedrals of proposition and argument.” His appreciation of poetic language, especially the evocative power of metaphors, was balanced by a hermeneutical suspicion of its idolatrous potential. Anticipating the postmodern debate regarding the efficacy of language, Lewis likened such language to a “window through which one glimpses God, but never a box in which God can be contained.” Citing Lewis’s poem, “A Footnote to All Prayers,” McLaren recalls how Lewis warned people against self-deception in prayer, “thinking that their images or thoughts of God are actually God.” He then affirms Lewis’s concluding petition that God “take not . . . our literal sense” but translate, instead, “our limping metaphors into God’s ‘great, /unbroken speech.’”41 McLaren is joined by Leonard Sweet and Jerry Haselmayer in a coedited book suggestively titled, A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church. Under “N is for Narrative,” the authors credit Lewis and the Inklings with reminding us of how easily we are “dulled and desensitized to the splendor of the Christian story,” alluding to Lewis’s recollection of the visionary paralysis caused by “Sunday school associations” and their “watchful dragons.” Indeed, for emergents the time has come to follow Lewis’s literary strategy: “We need to go out and come in again” via the “priceless galleria of images, stories, metaphors, rituals, and hymns as well as historians, philosophers, dramatists, novelists, poets, scientists, and prophets.”42 Here are echoes of his Epilogue to An Experiment in Criticism: “One of the things we feel after

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reading a great work is ‘I have got out.’ Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in’; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside.”43 The imagination, for Charlie Peacock, is “necessary to moral and ethical reflection and often inspires the actions that come out of such reflection.” It can be a “perfectly tuned engine of a truly good, creative life.” It is a mode of spiritual vision, but it has epistemological significance as well. Citing Lewis’s description of the imagination as an “organ of meaning,” Peacock marvels at its capacity to show God’s brilliance and serve as a “way of knowing that leads to ways of being and doing congruent with the will of God.”44 Similarly, it is the imagination that enables us to see in the shadows of the present life a glorious future with God—a vision Lauren F. Winner sees beautifully portrayed in the final volume of the Narnia Chronicles, The Last Battle. In the concluding scene, which depicts the end of time, she quotes from Lewis: . . . the things that began to happen . . . were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”45

This eschatological vision evokes powerful human responses in the hereand-now—promptings of longing for, and praise to, God. It is, of course, triggered by Lewis’s “baptized imagination” and its gaze through or beyond the “appearances” and “successive moments” of this life into the region of awe—a region that is ultimate . . . no longer successive. It is a vision that is shaped and colored by a literary imagination, with its grand narratives and potent metaphors of “homecoming” and “reunion with a beloved.”46 Winner, Peacock, and McLaren share with Lewis an “Enlightenment cynicism” and a journey of deconversion out of the epistemological confines of modernity. At the very least, for Winner, “the sum of the parts will never capture the whole” because there is such a thing as “the real story” and its “eternal reality”—a reality that beckons even now through the workings of the imagination. In this respect, Lewis was remarkably prescient, as Donald E. Glover observes: One of the most fascinating aspects of Lewis’s conversion is often lost in the critic’s hurry to get on to what Lewis became, forgetting what he was before. Up to this point, Lewis had been the typical intellectual student and then tutor of his day. . . . Yet [his] letters show a gradual shift toward the thoughtful analysis of the role played by emotion and sensuous response in an otherwise rational man’s life. . . . The result of

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his quite rational consideration of the meaning and role of the imagination as it created images of beauty in the reader’s mind was the realization that he had stopped short of understanding the aim of this delight, mistaking it for an end in itself.47

Lewis, as we have seen, gradually overcame this limitation in much the same way that a new generation of postmoderns has deconstructed the boundaries of the modern imagination. For this reason, they are drawn to the spatial metaphors of Lewis’s “region of awe” as well as his mythic forms and their powerful ability to fuse horizons between author, text, and reader. In short, the Emerging Church/Conversation finds in Lewis inspiration and, in some sense, legitimation for its own imaginative improvisations. When we turn to the EC-friendly theologians and theorists, we encounter an equally varied range of links to Lewis’s incarnational aesthetics. David C. Downing has noted how effectively Lewis speaks to our present era of postmodern deconstruction “because of his intellectual agility, his willingness to adopt de-centering strategies at the operational level, while rejecting selfcanceling denials about the possibility of ‘a still point in the turning world.’ ”48 Lewis was certainly aware of the social construction of knowledge, the inaccessibility of pure objectivity, and the historical relativity of models. In the Epilogue to The Discarded Image, he observed: No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. . . . It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts. . . . But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the quests we ask her. Here, as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not indeed elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in the witness’s mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest.49

Of particular concern, then, is the relationship between truth and imagination, especially the literary imagination—a concern that preoccupied Lewis and those who find in him a unique capacity to hold together a “metaphysical affirmation and epistemological humility.”50 Along these lines, the Lewis-inspired phenomenology of philosopher Dallas Willard and theologian Kevin Vanhoozer has proven especially relevant in EC circles. Willard is best known for his books on spiritual formation, including The Spirit of the Disciplines (1991) and The Divine Conspiracy (1998), and it is in this arena that he is often viewed as a mentor for the emerging church.51 But

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behind the scenes, the more theologically and philosophically inclined emergents also pay attention to his work on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the phenomenology of knowledge. It is out of this background of scholarly pursuits that Willard writes with unusual clarity and conviction about the “inner gathering of the self,” the benefits of solitude and silence, and, perhaps, most challenging of all, a robust understanding of the correspondence theory of truth.52 Willard is particularly concerned with an enduring evangelical tension between the personal experience of God and the authority of the Bible, as it is actually believed and practiced. Postevangelicals, especially emergents, are drawn to his provocative redefinition of the spiritual life in light of this tension—a project that is closely connected to his phenomenological epistemology. Regarding the latter, Willard identifies Lewis with the “classical” theory of correspondence—the idea that “truth is a matter of a belief or idea (representation, statement) corresponding to reality.” Borrowing from an illustration in Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Willard explains: In the course of rejecting the view that moral laws are mere social conventions he [Lewis] insists that they are, to the contrary, “Real truths.” “If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazi less true,” he says to his reader, “there must be something— some Real morality—for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said ‘New York’ each meant merely ‘the town I am imagining in my own head,’ how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all.”53

Acknowledging the difficulties that this theory faces in a postmodern climate of “disdain of truth,” Willard defends Lewis’s epistemology, in part, on phenomenological grounds, stressing how its objective ground for meaning “is a relation of a wholly new kind, as remote, as mysterious, as opaque to empirical study, as soul itself.” Lewis understood that “real truth” and its relation to meaning and reason is objective in a “strong” or intuitive sense, “comprehensible even though non-empirical.” The reality of this truth is “unyielding in the face of belief, desire, tradition and will,” while, at the same time, our beliefs and perceptions are relative. What matters is the means by which we aim these beliefs, perceptions, and resulting actions toward truth: “by comparing them to what they are about, or by careful inference, or even by acting on them, just as we can check in various ways whether the sighting mechanism on a rifle is ‘true’—possibly by firing it and comparing the result with the setting of the sighting mechanism.”54 This dispositional approach to the “truth question” is paramount throughout Willard’s writings, but it is most rigorously developed in his scholarly

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discussions of intuition in Husserlian phenomenology—an analysis that not only exceeds the scope of this paper, but also remains far beyond the direct purview of most EC readers. What is most important to note, for present purposes, is that this understanding of intuition possesses for both Willard and Lewis a potent mystical quality.55 By mystical, Willard means that our deepest intuitions or insights are constituted by a kind of nonempirical “viewing” of objects and objectivity that actually brings us into relation with them, as part of a greater whole. Consciousness, in fact, bends toward the reality of things even before we rely on language to organize or define the experience.56 This “inner experience” is also mystical in terms of the classic directness of the “phenomenological imperative”—“seeing for oneself ” or knowledge “by acquaintance.” This is the sort of “essence intuition” that is implied throughout much of Lewis’s work as well, especially, as we have seen, after his encounter with Barfield and his embrace of Coleridge’s theory of imagination. For Willard, this literary enterprise, with its associated “feelings, memories, images, perceptions, valuations and so forth” is ultimately grounded in “underivative intuitions of the objects” that prompt these varied responses (that is “experience essences”) and disclose their meanings.57 Willard finds Lewis helpful in demystifying some of this phenomenology for a wider audience, but, ultimately, his concern is epistemological. “We are in a world other than ourselves,” Willard insists, “and we are equipped to deal with it as it is, correcting our mistakes and misperceptions as we go.” 58 Willard appreciates Lewis’s cautious appeal to the imagination for much the same reason that Lewis scholars David C. Downing and Bruce Edwards both admire Lewis as a “discerning critic.” “[H]ow is it,” Downing asks, “that such an unshrinking foundationalist could also present analysis which parallels the de-centering strategies of several postmodern commentators?”59 How could Lewis’s rich metaphysics and mystical intuition of the “burning and undimensioned depth of the Divine Life” be reconciled with his redemptive deconstruction—as able and willing as Derrida, as Edwards puts it, to “sift the text [and the imagination] for internal incongruity, contradiction, and ambiguity”60 while, at the same time, expressing an openness to revelatory illumination originating in the “region of awe.”61 This remarkable way of knowing draws those who find the postmodern critique of traditional epistemology compelling even as they struggle to retain some semblance of traditional Christian belief. What attracts them, at the most basic level, is the participatory and relational aspect of the phenomenological imperative, as stated above. As an EC writer at VanguardChurch.blogspot.com observes, “Where Christian apologetics in the modern era sought to explain ‘Evidence that Demands a Verdict’ (a form of apologetics that served its purpose in the modern era but would have been of reign in the pre-modern era and is

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increasingly foreign in the postmodern era), Christianity in a postmodern era must instead invite people into interaction with this Living God.” Lewis anticipated this emerging mandate, and his following, as a result, includes not only philosophers like Willard, but also theologians like Kevin Vanhoozer—one of the most frequently cited thinkers in the EC world today. The VanguardChurch blog to which we have just referred goes on to credit Vanhoozer with developing a “postpropositional perspective on Scripture.” At another EC Web site, he is praised for not beginning his hermeneutical inquiries with distinctively modern concerns like inerrancy and inspiration, but rather the “drama of doctrine” as it is “meant to be played out using the script of God as its text.”62 Yet another EC blogger begins his posting with the following quotation from Vanhoozer to drive home the point that biblical vision is essentially a work of the imagination: The imagination, together with its linguistic offspring (e.g., metaphor), is another of those repressed themes in modernity. Rationalists held the imagination in low regard, while romantics understood its importance but failed to discipline it. By imagination I mean the power of synoptic vision—the ability to synthesize heterogeneous elements into a unity. The imagination is a cognitive faculty by which we see as whole what those without imagination see only as unrelated parts. Stories display the imagination in action, for it is the role of the plot (mythos) to unify various persons and events in a single story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Lewis would have agreed wholeheartedly with each of these observations, so it is not surprising that he is appreciatively invoked by Vanhoozer in the next quotation: C. S. Lewis insists that the imagination is a truth-bearing faculty whose bearers of truth are not propositions but myths. Myths enable us both to “taste” and to “see”: to experience ‘as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.” What gets conveyed, therefore, is not simply the proposition but something of the reality itself: not simply information about God, but God’s triune identity itself as this is displayed in and through his creative and redemptive work. Further, the words of Scripture do not simply inform us about God but act as the medium of divine discourse. It is these words—the stories, the promises, the warnings, etc.—that ought to orient Christians vis-`a-vis reality.63

Vanhoozer and Lewis are very much on the same page, at least as far as the bloggers at NextReformation.com are concerned. What they most appreciate about Vanhoozer is what they appreciate about Lewis—a way to think, or, perhaps we should say, imagine as Christians about the “post/modern way.” Whereas Willard generally emphasizes the “flow of consciousness,” its inseparability from the world, and, following Husserl, its prelinguistic cognition, Vanhoozer more sharply focuses the consciousness on texts, especially their

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authorial intent as ontological grounding. In other words, Willard’s phenomenology requires that we rightly act on the text, presupposing the Holy Spirit’s presence. Vanhoozer’s hermeneutical method requires that we must rightly interpret the text first. Both agree that “it is by action that we enter the reality of the world which the Bible is about.” As Willard suggests, “It is residing in Jesus’ word that permits us to enter the reality of God’s rule and become free from domination by other realities.”64 In effect, an “intention relation” is necessary, especially in the case of texts, for the disclosure of meaning. This intention is fundamentally moral in nature, as we have seen, requiring submission to the text or “active obedience” such that the text retains its objective status—its otherness.65 In an essay inspired by Lewis’s depiction of modernity in Pilgrim’s Regress, Vanhoozer expresses this intentionality in terms of a well-trained imagination: Theological wisdom is a matter of learning how to read and relate to reality rightly. The wise person is the one who understands and participates fittingly in the created order. We get wisdom by letting the biblical texts train our imaginations to see how things fit together theodramatically as Scripture depicts the world as created and redeemed; this picture generates a certain ethos that in turn shapes our moral character. Scripture also depicts the love of God—which is the summation of the law and hence the essence of Christian ethics—in the face of Jesus Christ. Ethics is about how to participate fittingly in the form of the good personified in Jesus Christ. Christianity thus represents an alternative way of doing justice to the other. Thanks to the theodramatic imagination, we see the other not as an unknowable, and hence unlovable, cipher, but as Jesus sees the other, as neighbor. In sum, the Bible situates both me and the other in a larger theodrama that orients right action by calling us to love others as God has loved us.

Vanhoozer echoes Lewis’s call for reenchantment in late modernity through a recovery of this mythos. Such a move restores, in a more general sense, our “capacity to see what is there,” which is, simultaneously, the capacity to see beyond the confines of the self. Simone Weil called this “attention,” which Vanhoozer recalls is “the ability to transcend oneself in order to see things as they are.” Just as Lewis was alert to the visionary solipsism of the Victorian romantics, Vanhoozer warns against postmodern varieties of narcissism that deflect attention away from the object of our attention toward the feelings associated therewith. Consequently, he finds Lewis’s “map” in Pilgrim’s Regress helpful in representing the postmodern turn.66 Vanhoozer also finds Lewis’s short essay, “Meditation in a Toolshed” particularly useful in illuminating the contours of our deconstructed world. It was originally intended to illustrate the difference between looking at and looking along. It begins with a brief story:

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I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.67

For Vanhoozer, the story is about the nature of knowledge. In Lewis’s modern world, the primary goal was to look at things—“those who are a step removed from the experience on which they bring their analytic-critical technique to bear.” This required distance and disinterestedness—an attitude that prevailed in every arena of inquiry, including the study of the Bible. “By and large,” Vanhoozer notes, “biblical scholars look at the Bible—at questions of its authorship, at questions of its composition, at questions of its historical reliability—instead of along it.”68 This brings Vanhoozer to Lewis’s question: “is knowing God more like seeing or tasting?” Postmoderns have offered deconstructed language, ethics, and aesthetics as possible venues for answering this question, but it is the biblicalpoetic imagination that ultimately plays the leading role in our engagement with the communicative agency of God. Vanhoozer concludes by listing the essential ingredients in this renewed encounter with the Bible. First, God has designed the imagination in such a way that we can actually see what is there, “particularly when the senses alone are unable to observe it.” The imagination bears this truth, though primarily in mythic form and in accordance with the constraints of the Scriptures themselves. Secondly, in this age of “image anemia,” we cannot only see what is there—in the world of the text—but participate in it by looking along its grain. There are, of course, different ways of seeing and “experiencing thinking” that allow us to enter this world, but the Scriptures remain our common “port of entry.” Thirdly, in the world of the text we see God, the world, and ourselves differently—in accordance with the divine communicative action—and we respond in faith. As a result, we become “wiser for our travels” and we “become right with God.”69 Through, in part, the Lewis-inspired phenomenology and hermeneutics of Willard, Vanhoozer, and their popularizers, the EC has debunked the modern notion that “looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along.”70 In whatever way Lewis’s insight is applied—in the creation of new forms of worship, new channels of literary endeavor (especially on the

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Internet), or new venues in the performing arts—there will remain an abiding reference to the “The Grand Miracle.” Through its “knowledge by acquaintance,” we find grounding for the sympathetic imagination. Its harmonies, associations, and transpositions subvert our self-sufficiencies, provincialisms, and pragmatic reductions. In its amalgam of thought-feeling-awareness we reunite, at least provisionally, the perceiving subject with the perceived object. Knowledge by acquaintance becomes knowledge through participation, with a “baptized vision” of particulars in relation to wholes that elicits a potent moral response. Through the “hints, similes, and metaphors” of the sympathetic imagination, Brian McLaren encounters the mystical, Charlie Peacock finds a deeper sense of congruence with the divine will, and Lauren Winner sees beyond appearances to a much anticipated “homecoming.” No wonder that Lewis declares the Incarnation to be “the central miracle asserted by Christians.” It was his chief source of inspiration, and he devoted most of his life to letting it work its peculiar magic in his mind and craft. “It digs beneath the surface, works through the rest of our knowledge by unexpected channels, harmonises best with our deepest apprehensions and our ‘second thoughts,’ ” he observed, “and in union with these undermines our superficial opinions.”71 For Lewis, that’s what incarnational aesthetics was all about. And, perhaps, that is ultimately what the emerging imagination is about today. NOTES 1. Shorter versions of this paper have been delivered at the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England ( July 24–August 6, 2005) and the C. S. Lewis & Friends Colloquium, Taylor University, Upland, Indiana ( June 1–4, 2006). 2. Paul Roberts, “Liturgy and Mission in Postmodern Culture: Some Reflections Arising from ‘Alternative’ Services and Communities,” http://seaspray.trinitybris.ac.uk (accessed September 5, 2003). The author is an ordained priest in the Church of England, serving parishes in Bristol. This online paper was presented at the “Alternative Worship Day” gathering at Lambeth Palace in 1995. 3. Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan-Emergent-YS, 2003), 135. Kimball’s church site can be visited online at http://vintagechurch.org. 4. Andy Crouch, “Visualcy: Literacy Is Not the Only Necessity in a Visual Culture,” Christianity Today (June 2005), 62. 5. Brian McLaren, “An Open Letter to Chuck Colson,” A New Kind of Christian, http://www.anewkindofchristian.com/archives/000018.html (accessed December 2003).

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6. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 145; also quoted in an interview with Jason Byassee, “New Kind of Christian: An Emergent Voice,” Christian Century (November 30, 2004), 29. 7. These concerns are raised by Alan Roxburgh, “Emergent Church: Filled with Creativity, Energetic Potential,” Allelon Ministries (June 15, 2005), http://www. allelon.org/articles/article.cfm?id=194&page=1 (accessed July 19, 2006). 8. Scott Bader-Sayre, “The Emergent Matrix: A New Kind of Church?” The Christian Century (November 30, 2004), 20–27; and Andy Crouch, “The Emergent Mystique,” Christianity Today (November 2004), 36–41. 9. Winner, quoted in Bader-Sayre, 26. Winner is author of the popular spiritual autobiography Girl Meets God: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2002). 10. C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 93–94. 11. Stephen M. Smith, “Awakening from the Enchantment of Worldliness: The Chronicles of Narnia as Pre-Apologetics,” in The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, ed. David Mills (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 168–181. 12. Regarding Lewis’s explicit evangelistic agenda, see especially his essay “Christianity and Culture,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 12–36. 13. Lewis, Magdalen College, Oxford, to Sister Penelope CSMV, July 9 (August) 1939, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949 (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2004), 262–263. 14. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, compiled and with Preface by Walter Hooper (New York: Harvest Book, Harcourt, 1996), 37. 15. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955), 221. Some prominent examples of deconversion and reconversion from EC circles include: Gordon Lynch’s Losing My Religion? Moving on from Evangelical Faith (London: DLT, 2003); Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical (El Cajon, CA: Emergent YS-Zondervan, 2003); Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003); and Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan, 2004), especially, chapter 9. For a helpful critical assessment of the deconversion phenomenon in contemporary evangelicalism, see Kurt A. Richardson, “Disorientations in Christian Belief: The Problem of De-traditionalization in the Postmodern Context,” in The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement, ed. David S. Dockery (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 53–56. 16. Louis Markos, Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 139. 17. Lewis, “Transposition,” in The Weight of Glory (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1949/1976, rev. 1980), 98–99. Transposition, for Lewis, is not strictly a literary strategy, but rather a broad statement of principle regarding the analogous relations between the spiritual and natural or the higher and the lower realms. Later in this

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passage, Lewis referred to the sacramental as a more advanced instance of transposition in Christian theology (p. 102). 18. Charlie Peacock, New Way to Be Human (Colorado Springs, CO: Shaw Books, 2004), 176; McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, 150–151; Yaconelli, quoted by McLaren, 77. 19. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 111. 20. Ibid., 113. 21. Ibid., 118. 22. Ibid., 120. 23. Thomas L. Martin, “Lewis: A Critical Prospective,” in Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis, ed. Thomas L. Martin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000), 382–384. 24. For a detailed summary and analysis of these letters, see Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis’ “Great War” with Owen Barfield (Cumbria, UK: Ink Books, 1978). 25. Lewis to Barfield, n.d., “The Great War,” vol. 1, 13, Barfield-Lewis Letters, The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois; see also Lewis, 1929/1930 (?) “De Bono et Malo,” Ms. [photocopy], 8, Edwin W. Brown Collection Center, Taylor University, Upland, Indiana. The latter manuscript was Lewis’s final installment in the exchange of treatises during the “War.” Regarding the importance of Barfield in this thought, Lewis recalled: “But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him. Much of the thought which he afterward put into Poetic Diction had already become mine before that important little book appeared. It would be strange if it had not. He was of course not so learned then as he has since become; but the genius was already there.” See Surprised by Joy, 200; also Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2005), 90–91. 26. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 217–218. 27. Ibid., 221–223. 28. For more on this transition, see James Patrick, “The Heart’s Desire and the Landlord’s Rules: C. S. Lewis as a Moral Philosopher,” in The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, ed. David Mills (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 70–85; and David Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 123–137. 29. Lewis to Barfield, 1928, “Clivi Hamiltonis Summae Metaphysices Contra Anthroposophos Libri II,” Part II (“Value”), Section XIV, Ms. [photocopy], Edwin W. Brown Collection. See also Adey, “Great War,” 69–78. 30. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 210: “The Absolute there ‘there,’ and that ‘there’ contained the reconciliation of all contraries, the transcendence of all finitude, the hidden glory which was the only perfectly real thing there is. In fact, it had much of the quality of Heaven.” 31. Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973 [original date of publication, 1928]), 88.

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32. Lewis, “Summae,” Part II (“Value”), Section XX, Edwin W. Brown Collection. For a more detailed analysis of this passage, see Adey, “Great War,” 84–87. 33. Lewis, “Epilogue,” in An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1961), 130, 139, 140. 34. Lewis spoke of his own baptized imagination in his preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1946), xxxviii; see also Surprised by Joy, 179–180. 35. The term “phenomenology” is often used in the sense of Rudolf Otto’s notion of the numinous—the experience of “the holy” aside from its moral or rational aspects. Lewis appreciated Otto’s phenomenological description of the universal or essential aspects of religious experience, but he also acquired a taste for philosophical phenomenology from the lingering neo-Hegelianism at Oxford University—especially that of T. H. Green (d. 1882), F. H. Bradley (d. 1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (d. 1923), all of whom were “mighty names” in Lewis’s intellectual formation. Their cumulative effect on Lewis was to provide a door into Christianity; this according a letter he wrote to Paul Elmer More, October 25, 1934, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, p. 145. Green and Bradley, in particular, appropriated the venerable notion of sympathy into their modified Hegelianism as a mode of moral reasoning. It was also a more popular expression of ethical sentimentalism that influenced evangelical piety throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John MacCunn provides an introduction to Green’s version of sympathy in a standard work that was contemporary with Lewis’s philosophical studies; see Six Radical Thinkers (New York: Russell & Russell, 1910/1964), 215–266. For a recent overview of Lewis’s idealist phase, see David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 123–137. 36. Lewis, “The Language of Religion,” in Christian Reflections, 137–138. For a helpful survey of how Lewis accomplished this in his fictional works, see Kath Filmer-Davies, “Fantasy,” in Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis, ed. Thomas L. Martin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000), 285–296. Thus, in The Narnia Chronicles, we see how community forms through the mutuality and cooperation of siblings, each with their own distinctive roles and individualities, but also varying capacities of affection and friendship. We also see how the wicked witch, Jadis, seeks to destroy these sympathetic relations and, in the telling of the story, we find ourselves identifying with the struggle to resist and, sometimes, redeem the resulting brokenness. The Space Trilogy takes us further into the realm of human and social psychology, but, as Kath Filmer-Davies has observed, as much through an exploration of inner space, as outer. In The Great Divorce, we plunge into the dark world of human selfishness while, in Lewis’s last novel, Till We Have Faces, we encounter the fundamental human tension between submission and control. In all of these works of fantasy, the immediate concern with interpersonal dynamics remains accessible to our (the reader’s) sympathetic imagination. Accordingly, by the very act of “good reading”

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we are moving about in a world that is creatively designed to nudge us beyond the tiny sphere, if not prison, of our own self-interest. 37. See, for example, Dan Devadatta, Strangers but Not Strange: A New Mission Situation for the Church (I Peter 1:1–2 and 17–25), in Craig Van Gelder, ed., Confident Witness—Changing World: Rediscovering the Gospel in North America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 110–124; James Wm. McClendon, Jr., “The Practice of Community Formation,” in Nancey Murphy et al., Virtues & Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics After MacIntyre (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1997), 85–110; and The Rutba House, ed., School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2005). 38. Bronsink, “Arts: Imaginatively Indwelling God’s Word in Postmodernity,” 10, http://www.emergentvillage.com/downloads/resources/other/ARTS Imaginatively Dwelling.pdf (accessed July 1, 2006). 39. Paul Roberts, “Considering Emerging Church,” Thinking Anglicans (August 28, 2003) http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/000129.html (accessed July 6, 2006). 40. An example of such collaboration has been the recent series of annual Emergent-YS Conventions, each designed to break-down the modern rupture between theory and practice, especially regarding “critical concerns” like “Creating a Climate for Creativity and Innovation in Ministry” or “Reimagining Spiritual Formation: The Role of Missional Communities,” Emergent-YS Convention, Nashville, Tennessee (May 18–21, 2005). 41. McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, 151, 154, 155. 42. Leonard Sweet, Brian D. McLaren, and Jerry Haselmayer, A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 206. 43. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 138. 44. Peacock, New Way to Be Human, 176. 45. Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God, 193–194. 46. See, especially, Lewis’s essay “On Stories,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Inc., 1966), 3–21; and Surprised by Joy, 220–222. 47. Donald E. Glover, C. S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), 18–19. 48. David. C. Downing, “From Pillar to Postmodernism: C. S. Lewis and Current Critical Discourse,” Christianity and Literature 46 (Winter 1997): 169–178. 49. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1964), 222–223. I am indebted to David Downing for drawing my attention to this passage. 50. Downing, “From Pillar to Postmodernism,” 176. 51. Willard’s popularity is noted in Andy Crouch, “The Emergent Mystique,” 40. Eric Hurtgen, “Stepping into Community,” http://www.relevantmagazine. com/god article.php?id=6964 (accessed July 6, 2006).

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52. For a sampling of Emergent interest in such Willard-related topics, see, for example, Eric Hurtgen, “Stepping into Community”; and Tomlinson, The PostEvangelical, 11–13. 53. Willard, “Truth in the Fire: C. S. Lewis and Pursuit of Truth Today,” http:// www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=68 (accessed July 6, 2006). Willard quotes from Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 11. 54. Willard, “Truth in the Fire,” 5–10. 55. Indeed, this has become a cause of nagging controversy for Willard in many of his popular writings on spiritual formation. See, for example, a blogsphere “rant” on Willard’s “inner light” mysticism, http://emergentno.blogspot.com (accessed July 6, 2006). 56 . Willard, “Degradation of Logical Form,” http://www.dwillard.org/articles/ artview.asp?artID=24 (accessed July 6, 2006) (originally in Axiomathes [1997]: 42–43). 57. Willard, “Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Phenemenology,” 3, 6, http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=32 (accessed July 6, 2006). 58. Willard, “Truth in the Fire,” 14. 59. Downing, “From Pillar to Postmodernism,” 176. 60. Bruce L. Edwards, “Rehabilitating Reading: C. S. Lewis and Contemporary Critical Theory,” in The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer, ed. Bruce Edwards (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 29. 61. Downing, “From Pillar to Postmodernism,” 176. 62. Scot McKnight, “Emergent Voices” [cited March 2, 2006] http://www. jesuscreed.org. 63. “Imagination and Biblical Vision” [cited June 14, 2006] http:// nextreformation.com, quoting from Vanhoozer’s “Pilgrim’s Digress: Christian Thinking on and about the Post/Modern Way,” in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views, ed. Myron B. Penner (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 71–103. 64. See Willard’s review of Vanhoozer’s hermeneutical method in “Hermeneutical Occasionalism,” in Disciplining Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Christian Perspective, ed. Roger Lundin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 167–172. 65. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 74–80. 66. Vanhoozer, “Pilgrim’s Digress,” 90. 67. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 212–215. 68. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture & Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 18. 69. Ibid., 36–39. 70. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” 215. 71. Lewis, Miracles, 131.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adey, Lionel. C. S. Lewis’ ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield. Cumbria, UK: Ink Books, 1978. Bader-Sayre, Scott. “The Emergent Matrix: A New Kind of Church?” The Christian Century 30 (November 2004), 20–27. Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1928/1973. Bronsink, Troy. “Arts: Imaginatively Indwelling God’s Word in Postmodernity” [November 28, 2001]. At http://www.emergentvillage.com/downloads/ resources/other/ARTS ImaginativelyDwelling.pdf (accessed July 19, 2006). Byassee, Jason. “New Kind of Christian: An Emergent Voice.” Christian Century 30 (November, 2004), 29. Crouch, Andy. “The Emergent Mystique.” Christianity Today (November 2004): 36–41. ———. “Visualcy: Literacy Is Not the Only Necessity in a Visual Culture.” Christianity Today (June 2005), 62. Devadatta, Dan. Strangers But Not Strange: A New Mission Situation for the Church (I Peter 1:1–2 and 17–25). In Confident Witness—Changing World: Rediscovering the Gospel in North America. Edited by Craig Van Gelder. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999, 110–124. Downing, David C. “From Pillar to Postmodernism: C. S. Lewis and Current Critical Discourse.” Christianity and Literature 46 (Winter 1997), 169–178. ———. The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002. Edwards, Bruce. “Rehabilitating Reading: C. S. Lewis and Contemporary Critical Theory.” In The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. Edited by Bruce Edwards. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1988. Filmer-Davies, Kath. “Fantasy.” In Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis. Edited by Thomas L. Martin. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000, 285–296. Glover, Donald E. C. S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981. Hurtgen, Eric. “Stepping into Community,” http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god article.php?id=6964. (Accessed July 6, 2006). Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2005. Kimball, Dan. The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan-Emergent-YS, 2003. Lewis, C. S. “Christian Apologetics.” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 89–103. ———. “Christianity and Culture.” In Christian Reflections. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967, 12–36.

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———. “De Bono et Malo” [Ms. 1929/1930 (?) photocopy, 8, Barfield-Lewis Letters]. Edwin W. Brown Collection Center, Taylor University, Upland, Indiana. ———. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. ———. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. ———. George MacDonald: An Anthology. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1946. ———.“The Language of Religion.” In Christian Reflections. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967, 129–141. ———. “Meditation in a Toolshed.” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970, 212–215. ———. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1943. ———. Miracles: A Preliminary Study. New York: Macmillan, 1947/1960. ———. “On Stories.” In Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Inc., 1966, 3–21. ———. “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.” In Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Compiled by Walter Hooper. New York: Harvest Book, Harcourt, 1996, 35–38. ———. “Summae” [Part II (“Value”), Section XX, photocopy]. Edwin W. Brown Collection, n.d. ———. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955. ———. “Transposition.” In The Weight of Glory. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1980, 91–115. Lewis, C. S. to Owen Barfield, n.d., “The Great War” [Vol. 1, 13, Barfield-Lewis Letters]. At the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Lewis, C. S. to Owen Barfield. “Clivi Hamiltonis Summae Metaphysices Contra Anthroposophos Libri II,” [1928, Part II (“Value”), Section XIV, Ms. [photocopy]). Edwin W. Brown Collection. Lewis, C. S. to Paul Elmer More, October 25, 1934. In The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2. Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2004. Lewis, C. S., Magdalen College-Oxford, to Sister Penelope CSMV, July 9 (August) 1939. In The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Edited by Walter Hooper. Vol. 2. Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2004. Lynch, Gordon. Losing My Religion? Moving on From Evangelical Faith. London: DLT, 2003. MacCunn, John. Six Radical Thinkers. New York: Russell & Russell, 1910/1964. Markos, Louis. Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2003. Martin, Thomas L. “Lewis: A Critical Prospective.” In Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis. Edited by Thomas L. Martin. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000, 371–392.

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McClendon, James Wm. Jr. “The Practice of Community Formation.” In Virtues & Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics After MacIntyre. Edited by Nancey Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg, and Mark Thiessen. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1997, 85–110. McKnight, Scot. “Emergent Voices” [March 2, 2006], http://www.jesuscreed. org/?cat=2&paged=6 (accessed July 16, 2006). McLaren, Brian. A Generous Orthodoxy. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004. ———. “An Open Letter to Chuck Colson” [December 2003], http:// www.anewkindofchristian.com/archives/000018.html (accessed July 19, 2006). Miller, Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003. Patrick, James. “The Heart’s Desire and the Landlord’s Rules: C. S. Lewis as a Moral Philosopher.” In The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness. Edited by David Mills. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998, 70–85. Peacock, Charlie. New Way to Be Human. Colorado Springs, CO: Shaw Books, 2004. Richardson, Kurt A. “Disorientations in Christian Belief: The Problem of Detraditionalization in the Postmodern Context.” In The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement. Edited by David S. Dockery. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995, 53–66. Roberts, Paul. “Considering Emerging Church” [August 28, 2003], http://www. thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/000129.html (accessed July 20, 2005). ———. “Liturgy and Mission in Postmodern Culture: Some Reflections Arising from ‘Alternative’ Services and Communities” [1995], http://seaspray.trinitybris.ac.uk/∼robertsp/papers/lambeth.html (accessed September 5, 2003). Roxburgh, Alan. “Emergent Church: Filled with Creativity, Energetic Potential” (June 15, 2005), http://www.allelon.org/articles/article.cfm?id=194&page=1 (accessed July 19, 2006). Rutba House. School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2005. Smith, Stephen M. “Awakening from the Enchantment of Worldliness: The Chronicles of Narnia as Pre-Apologetics.” In The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness. Edited by David Mills. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998, 168–181. Sweet, Leonard, Brian D. McLaren, and Jerry Haselmayer. A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003. Tomlinson, Dave. The Post-Evangelical. El Cajon, CA: Emergent YS-Zondervan, 2003. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. First Theology: God, Scripture & Hermeneutics. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002. ———. Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.

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———. “Pilgrim’s Digress: Christian Thinking on and about the Post/Modern Way.” In Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views. Edited by Myron B. Penner. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005, 71–103. Willard, Dallas. “Degradation of Logical Form,” http://www.dwillard.org/articles/ artview.asp?artID=24 (accessed July 6, 2006). ———. “Hermeneutical Occasionalism.” In Disciplining Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Christian Perspective. Edited by Roger Lundin. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997, 167–172. ———. “Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Phenemenology,” http:// www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=32 (accessed July 6, 2006). ———. “Truth in the Fire: C. S. Lewis and Pursuit of Truth Today,” http:// www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=68 (accessed July 6, 2006). Winner, Lauren. Girl Meets God: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2002.

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Letters to Malcolm: C. S. Lewis on Prayer Marjorie Lamp Mead

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, which contains the most developed statement of C. S. Lewis’s mature faith, is unfortunately one of his least known works of religious thought. A slim volume of only 124 pages in the American first edition, it consists of twenty-two fictional letters addressed by the author to a “friend.” The subject matter of this correspondence covers a range of religious topics, but as the title indicates, it primarily revolves around questions and concerns related to prayer. The fact that many readers assume that Malcolm, the book’s imaginary correspondent, is an actual person is a testimony to Lewis’s skill at epistolary fabrication—an ability he first demonstrated in The Screwtape Letters, some twenty years earlier. By providing Malcolm with a fictional wife, Betty, and a son named George, Lewis created a believable, “real-life” context in which the everyday aspects of prayer could be explored. As a result, this format enabled his consideration of prayer to pass beyond the merely theoretical into the actual and the practical. Or to put it another way, this fictional conversation brought alive what could have become simply an abstract philosophical discussion— and thereby contributed significantly to the impact of this book. When Lewis first began to write a book-length study on the subject of prayer, he did not envision such an approach. Indeed, his initial attempt followed the more traditional pattern of a carefully reasoned and sustained

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argument. However, this way of approaching the subject did not proceed smoothly for Lewis, and the work on prayer was never completed in this form. We know something of the abortive history of this original attempt due to a few intriguing mentions in Lewis’s correspondence. Most of these references occur in letters that Lewis wrote to Don Giovanni Calabria, an Italian priest and founder of the Congregation of The Poor Servants of Divine Providence in Verona. The two men began corresponding in 1947 after Don Giovanni read The Screwtape Letters. Through their exchange of letters, the two men had grown to deeply respect one another, and accordingly, Lewis often shared spiritual concerns with this pen-friend. One of these concerns focused on prayer—and in particular, on a question that Lewis was striving to answer as he began to compose his new book on prayer. The first mention of this writing project occurs in a letter of January 5, 1953, when Lewis wrote to Don Giovanni asking for his prayers for a book that he was just beginning. Lewis explained that he had in mind a volume written for the laity on the practice of private prayer. His intention was to especially target those who were new to the Christian faith and had not yet developed a regular habit of prayer. Lewis went to say that while he felt there were already many beneficial books on prayer, in his estimation they were aimed at those who were already mature Christians, and perhaps, even members of religious communities. His book, in contrast, was intended primarily to assist the beginner in prayer—for Lewis remembered well the difficulties he, himself, had faced when he first began to pray after he became an adult convert. But in spite of Lewis’s desire to write this type of book, he began to encounter numerous difficulties from the first. Uncertain whether or not he should even continue on, he wrote to his friend, Don Giovanni, to enlist his prayers for the task, fearing that adversity might cause him to withdraw too hastily from what God was calling him to do; but also being concerned that he not forge ahead, if he was not qualified to do so. In addition to marking the preliminary stages of Lewis’s effort to write on prayer, the specifics of this prayer request are illustrative of Lewis’s Christian character—for it not only demonstrates his desire to be obedient to God’s call upon his talents, but it also underscores his genuine humility. At this point in his career, Lewis was already an internationally celebrated success as an author and Christian spokesperson. Yet, in spite of all the outward acclaim, he did not presume that he necessarily possessed the wisdom to write on such a fundamental aspect of his faith. Just a few days after his letter to Don Giovanni stating that he was beginning the book on prayer, Lewis wrote again to ask for help with an issue that was baffling him: how is it possible to reconcile two seemingly contradictory

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models of prayer that were present in the New Testament? The first model requires that we submit our request to God and thereby be willing to receive a possible denial. In contrast, the second model taught that we should pray with full confidence that we will receive a positive answer. Lewis’s quandary— which he placed before Don Giovanni—was very simply this: How is it possible for a man, at one and the same moment of time, both to believe most fully that he will receive and to submit himself to the Will of God—Who is perhaps refusing him? . . . How is it possible to say simultaneously, “I firmly believe that Thou wilt give me this,” and, “If Thou shalt deny me it, Thy will be done”? How can one mental act both exclude possible refusal and consider it?1

We have no record of how Don Giovanni responded to this question. But we do know that Lewis continued to struggle to find a satisfactory way to reconcile this difficult paradox. In fact, several months after he first posed this query, he writes again to update Don Giovanni. After mentioning that he is still at work on his book on prayer, Lewis then adds: “About this question which I submitted to you, I am asking all theologians: so far in vain.”2 A further indication of this unresolved matter could be found in an address that Lewis gave at the end of 1953 to the Oxford Clerical Society. At the time of this talk, it had been almost a year since he first wrote to Don Giovanni indicating that he was beginning to write on the topic of prayer. Throughout the subsequent months, Lewis continued to wrestle with this question, but with little apparent success as it formed the basis of his December talk—“Petitionary Prayer: A Problem without An Answer.” He began the talk by articulating his confusion over how it might be possible to reconcile Pattern A (“Thy will be done”) with Pattern B (confident faith that what is asked will in fact be received). After setting up the initial problem, he goes on to spend the remainder of his time, exploring and eventually rejecting various potential answers to this question as being inadequate. Toward the end of his presentation, he makes the following confession: “I have no answer to my problem, though I have taken it to about every Christian I know, learned or simple, lay or clerical, within my own Communion or without.”3 Far from despairing over this unresolved problem, however, Lewis goes on to offer that he does not believe that the answer to this question resides in a forced or manufactured sense of certitude. In other words, whatever it does mean to pray with a confident sense of the final outcome, Lewis rejects the notion that the solution is a simple matter of exerting one’s willpower. Nor, does he accept the view that God is placing before his followers an unfair expectation (that is, requiring the exercise of a type of faith, which cannot truly be exercised apart from God, himself, bestowing it).

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At this point in his Christian life, more than two decades after his conversion, Lewis is not afraid to acknowledge that he faces a problem he cannot solve. But significantly, this ambiguity does not cause him to give up on prayer. As he readily affirms in this talk to the Oxford clerics, the reality of answered prayer in his own life is abundant and filled with many good things, even though he does not yet understand all that the scriptures teach about it. However, just two months after he gave this address, Lewis wrote to his friend, Sister Penelope (a member of the Anglican Convent of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin at Wantage, England) acknowledging he had finally yielded to the obstacles that he could not overcome and stopped writing his book on prayer, as “it was clearly not for me.”4 Lewis’s confidence in the act of prayer, itself, remained unabated, but his ability to write about it had clearly reached an impasse. Even though this early composition of Lewis’s on prayer was never completed nor published, we are fortunate that it has survived as a forty-eight-page manuscript fragment.5 In looking at this early work, it is evident that Lewis was struggling with more than the apparent conflict between the two models of prayer that he wrote about to Don Giovanni. In fact, this draft manuscript reveals various false starts that, for the most part, revolve around his explanation of the prayer of Adoration. What we cannot determine from this manuscript is whether or not these multiple drafts reflect Lewis’s normal mode of writing, or whether they are instead a reflection of his difficulties with the topic of prayer. The answer may very well be that both elements are true. It has generally been believed that Lewis was a first-draft writer, who did little revision—and indeed these pages bear remarkably few cross-outs given that it is a handwritten manuscript. But what also becomes noticeable from reviewing this fragment is that Lewis used clean pages to try his multiple variants. Thus, it is possible, though not certain, that he may have used a similar approach in other compositions. In which case, once he had determined his final draft, the other variant pages would have been thrown out and all indications of his major revision process would have been lost. However, whether or not this speculation about his writing method is true or not, it is obvious that at this point in time Lewis was not finding it easy to record his thoughts on prayer. This manuscript fragment is intriguing for other reasons as well. It is significant to note that what Lewis does say in this draft is consistent with what he would later write about prayer in his published volume, Letters to Malcolm. Generally speaking, it does not appear that his view of prayer was radically altered during the intervening decade between the two approaches, but only that his understanding was clarified and deepened. Not surprisingly, the style of this fragment is similar in tone and approach to his apologetic

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works such as Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. As he did in those works, Lewis skillfully utilizes examples from everyday life to shed light on confusing issues, but there are less of these real-life parallels than in his other works. As a result, he spends more time in straightforward and carefully reasoned arguments. Thus, the text tends to require more of the reader—a potential hazard of which Lewis was no doubt well aware. In one brief section of this draft, Lewis tries an alternative approach by creating two fictional characters (Mr. Drysdale and Mr. Land) and using their differing experiences to aid his discussion of prayer. In both examples, he is attempting to clarify the essential importance of good intentions in our prayers. Given that the results of prayer are solely up to God, Lewis maintains that good intentions are all we can and should contribute to our prayers. The rest remains in God’s hands. The use of these imaginary examples to explain this concept underscores the difficulty that Lewis was encountering. Finding satisfactory parallels from everyday life to illuminate prayer was proving unusually challenging, so he resorted to fictional cases. Later, in Letters to Malcolm, this same fictional technique would prove to be the crucial element that finally allowed him to break through creative and conceptual barriers to produce a full-length work on prayer. It is also helpful to notice that sections of this manuscript eventually reappeared in revised form in chapter 9 of Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms (which was published in 1958, some four years after Lewis abandoned his first attempt at writing a book on prayer). The overall topic of this chapter is the prayer of adoration—or praise. The common portions between these two texts have to do with the obstacles that the scriptural injunction to praise God usually raises in the minds of modern men and women, who erroneously perceive the commandment for adoration as a demonstration of coerced flattery, which is therefore false. Accordingly, Lewis spends a great deal of effort attempting to overcome this misperception (acknowledging that it was something that he struggled with when he first became a Christian). In the manuscript fragment, he uses a lengthy descriptive account of an immense gathering of creatures coming together to worship their Creator as a way of illustrating that praise, truly understood, is overwhelming delight and not servile duty (a sequence that is reminiscent of the Great Dance passage at the end of his science fiction novel, Perelandra). He also tries several times to work out plausible parallels between an earthly monarch and the duty owed to her or his temporal position as a way of demonstrating that we not only owe God our praise, we actually long to praise—because such praise completes, enhances, and perfects our delight and appreciation. Thus, we “enjoy” God when we express our adoration. Ultimately, Lewis concludes that the fundamental difficulty for modern women and men is that they do

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not know how to “bow” spiritually, and therefore they resist what would truly make them happy beyond all imagining. It should further be noted that because Lewis found his work with the Psalms to be a sufficiently helpful means of illustrating this concept, he did not feel it necessary to cover this topic to any great extent when he later wrote Letters to Malcolm. There are additional places within this manuscript that echo Lewis’s other works. For instance, he briefly raises the distinction between “looking at” something and “looking along”6 —a key Lewisian concept that he had earlier developed more fully in the essay, “Meditation in a Toolshed” (published July 17, 1945 in The Coventry Evening Telegraph). This application of an important concept on the difference between enjoyment and contemplation that he gathered from Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity (1920) is also touched upon in Letter 1 of Letters to Malcolm. A second example of this reiteration of themes is found in the problem of why we need to ask God for anything since he is omniscient;7 a matter that Lewis had explored in greater detail in a prior essay “Work and Prayer” (published May 28, 1945 in The Coventry Evening Telegraph). None of this repetition and elaboration of subject matter is surprising. As with most authors, themes reoccur and are explored from various perspectives over and over again until the writer has exhausted what he desires to say. Prayer, in particular, was a topic that continually cropped up on Lewis’s writings. As with most of Lewis’s religious works, there are brief biographical allusions scattered throughout the manuscript. However, one of the most intriguing of these connections is not identified by Lewis, though knowledge of his biography highlights the association. In this instance, a reference to the dangers of introspective prayer, and in particular the destructiveness of overzealousness in prayer,8 poignantly conjures up Lewis as a young boy lying awake in his drafty, moonlit Wynyard dormitory, attempting to pray, feeling it was a failure, and then miserably repeating his prayers over again in a vain effort to “get it right.”9 Perhaps it was this boyhood experience with an overly sensitive false conscience, more than any other, which taught him the futility of basing prayer upon manufactured emotions (a subject that he discusses with great insight at various points throughout Letters to Malcolm; most extensively toward the end of Letter 6). One final biographical connection of special interest to be found in the manuscript fragment is Lewis’s declaration that he was raised outside the Christian tradition.10 Certainly, by all outward standards, his immediate family and childhood experiences were firmly grounded in the Christian faith: as an infant he was baptized by his grandfather, and throughout his early years, he attended worship services regularly at St. Mark’s Church Dundela, where his father served as Sunday School Superintendent. His mother’s final

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gift to him was a leather-bound Bible. And there is no doubt that he was taught the basics of Christianity as a boy. But nonetheless, as this comment makes clear, Lewis, himself, did not feel that he assimilated the Christian faith sufficiently so that it had become a part of his own mindset. As a result, he identified instead with those raised outside the faith. An intriguing comment and an insightful one, it underscores Lewis’s innate ability to comprehend the questions and context of his unbelieving readers; a perspective that obviously aided him in his religious writings. Before leaving our discussion of this manuscript fragment, it is worthwhile to record some of the basic summary statements on prayer that Lewis makes here. He views prayer as a necessary part of the life of every Christian, something that we are instructed to do. And because prayer is ultimately personal intercourse with God, it is of overwhelming importance. It is also an act of endless delight as through the prayer of worship or adoration, we are invited to “to glorify God and enjoy him forever” (here Lewis quotes the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), as he later does in Letter 21 of Letters to Malcolm). And finally, he observes three significant aspects of human interaction (enjoyment, request, and confession), and accordingly notes that our conversation or prayer with God reflects the same three elements (adoration, petition, and penitence). In drawing this parallel, Lewis emphasizes the relational characteristic of prayer. He also points out that the only prayer that is eternal is the Prayer of Adoration (since in heaven, there will be no need for either request or confession). Thus, in making this observation, he stresses the importance of our learning to worship or adore in our current earthly state, as this will be the sole type of prayer that endures forever. Even though Lewis never completed this early draft on prayer, it is clear that this unfinished manuscript had continuing value to him. As already indicated, he utilized some of it directly by incorporating portions of what he had earlier written into his subsequent publications such as Reflections on the Psalms. In addition, the fact that he kept the manuscript fragment at all is noteworthy. Unlike some authors, who retain manuscript copies permanently in their files, it was not Lewis’s usual practice to do so (and as a result, relatively few of his manuscripts that were published in his lifetime have survived). In spite of his failure to complete this manuscript, it is evident that Lewis did not consider that he was finished with the subject matter. And indeed, as we know, he was not. Ten years after this first draft on prayer was composed, Lewis began to work on a new book that approached the topic in a creatively different manner. Having learned from his first attempt that describing prayer in a theoretical way was challenging, as it did not allow him sufficient scope for unresolved

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questions, he now approached it by a device that he had used to great effect in The Screwtape Letters. In once again employing the technique of a fictional correspondent, Lewis was able to shift from the constraints of a conceptual approach to a more discursive and free-flowing style—in essence, to engage the reader in an informal conversation about prayer, which in turn, gave him great liberty in regard to themes and methodology. As a result, what had required paragraphs, even pages, of setup in the early draft manuscript could now be handled with much less detail in this conversational approach. As is typical of a casual discussion, rather than a reasoned statement of argumentation, there is no linear organizational pattern to this book. Indeed, as one reads Letters to Malcolm, it becomes apparent that any given subject may weave in and out, as threads of thought are first raised and then dropped, only to be picked up again in a later letter. This somewhat random structure adds a note of realism to the volume, as this unsystematic manner reflects the usual pattern of an informal conversation, but it also makes summary statements about the content more difficult. Letters to Malcolm was published on January 27, 1964, two months after Lewis’s death,11 and was the last manuscript he personally prepared for publication.12 He began to write it in January 1963 and had completed it by April. In spite of the fact that the composition of this book proceeded much more smoothly than his earlier effort, he was still characteristically modest about the result. As he confided on April 22 to an American correspondent of long standing, Mary Willis Shelburne: “I’ve finished a book on Prayer. Don’t know if it is any good.”13 Such diffidence was misplaced, however, and the work was enthusiastically received by his publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, who declared that this work “has knocked me flat. Not quite; I can just sit up and shout hurrah, and again, hurrah.”14 He further added that it was the best Lewis had penned since The Problem of Pain, which was written more than two decades earlier. But in spite of this enthusiastic response, Lewis continued to remain unassuming about what he had written. In replying to Gibb’s request for a dust jacket blurb for the book, Lewis cautioned “I’d like you to make the point that the reader is merely being allowed to listen to two ordinary laymen discussing the practical and speculative problems of prayer as these appear to them.”15 He then went on to underscore that he wasn’t claiming to teach about prayer in this book. This final comment by Lewis is most revealing of why he chose to write Letters to Malcolm in the epistolary format. Only by approaching the subject of prayer in this way could he avoid making the structured authoritative statements that a more formal work of exposition would demand. This does not mean that Lewis does not include forceful statements on the nature of prayer in Letters to Malcolm, for he does do so frequently throughout this

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volume. Yet this conversational approach allows him significant freedom in how he supports such statements; it also enables him to add brief comments here and there, without detailed substantiation. One might almost say that the use of letters as the context permits Lewis to simply offer opinions, instead of being required to develop and defend his arguments. Not that Lewis was ever adverse to the give and take of argumentation. But as he makes manifestly clear